COLLECTED 
ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 



BY 

WILLIAM JAMES 



■8 



LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 

1920 



\\ 






COPTKIGHT, 1920, BY LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 
ALL, RIGHTS RESERVED 



JEC 2i 



PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO., BOSTON 



§>CI.A605052 



CONTENTS 



[1875] . . 

[1876] . . 

[1876] . . 

of Mind 



Preface 

I. Sargent's Planchette [1869] 
II. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind 
[1875] 

III. German Pessimism [1875] 

IV. Chauncet Wright 
V. Bain and Renouyier 

VI. Kenan's Dialogues 
VII. Lewes's Physical Basis 

[1877] 

VIII. Remarks on Spencer's Definition 

of Mind as Correspondence [1878] 

IX. Quelques Considerations stjr la 

Methode Subjective [1878] . . 

X. The Sentiment of Rationality 

[1879] 

XI. Clifford's Lectures and Essays 

[1879] 

XII. Spencer's Data of Ethics [1879] 
XIII. The Feeling of Effort [1880] . 
XIV. The Sense of Dizziness in Deaf- 

Mutes [1882] 

XV. What is an Emotion? [1884] . . 
XVI. The Religious Aspect of Philoso- 
phy [1885] 

XVII. The Consciousness of Lost Limbs 

[1887] 

XVIII. Reponse aux Remarques de M. 
Renouyier stjr sa Theorie de la 

Volonte [1888] 

XIX. The Psychological Theory of Ex- 
tension [1889] 



PAGE 
V 

1 

4 
12 
20 
26 
36 

40 

43 

69 

83 

137 
147 

151 

220 
244 

276 

285 

303 
310 



m 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XX. A Plea for Psychology as a "Nat- 
ural Science" [1892] .... 316 
XXI. The Original Datum of Space- 
Consciousness [1893] .... 328 
XXII. Mr. Bradley on Immediate Re- 
semblance [1893] 333 

XXIII. Immediate Resemblance [1893] . 339 

XXIV. Ladd's Psychology: Descriptive and 

Explanatory [1894] 342 

XXV. The Physical Basis of Emotion 

[1894] 346 

XXVI. The Knowing of Things Together 

[1895] 371 

XXVII. Degeneration and Genius [1895] . 401 
XXVIII. Philosophical Conceptions and 

Practical Results [1898] . . 406 
XXIX. Hodgson's Observations of Trance 

[1898] 438 

XXX. Personal Idealism [1903] .... 442 

XXXI. The Chicago School [1904] ... 445 

XXXII. Humanism [1904] ...... 448 

XXXIII. Laura Bridgman [1904] .... 453 

XXXIV. G. Papini and the Pragmatist 

Movement in Italy [1906] . . . 459 
XXXV. The Mad Absolute [1906] ... 467 
XXXVI. Controversy about Truth [1907] 470 
XXXVII. Report on Mrs. Piper's Hodgson- 
Control [1909] 484 

XXXVIII. Bradley or Bergson? [1910] . . 491 
XXXIX. A Suggestion about Mysticism 

[1910] 500 

Index 515 



IV 



PKEFACE 

This volume brings together for the convenience 
of students thirty-nine scattered articles and re- 
views by William James. None of these has here- 
tofore appeared in book form, and many have 
been lost sight of and forgotten. The present vol- 
ume when added to those already published will 
render easily accessible nearly all of the author's 
significant writings. The few exceptions will be 
noted presently. 

In presenting this book to the public the editor 
is fully aware that he will meet with criticism from 
two opposite angles, on the one hand from those who 
disbelieve in posthumous publications altogether, 
and on the other hand from those who would reprint 
every work of the author's pen whose authenticity 
can be established. 

The justification of publishing such a book at all 
lies in the interest and convenience of the wide circle 
of James's students and of the still wider circle of 
those who delight in reading him. The forthcoming 
Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William 
James (1920) contains approximately three hun- 
dred titles, exclusive of translations and posthu- 
mous publications. Of these only nine are the titles 
of books, and of these nine books, only three 
(Human Immortality, Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience, and Psychology: Briefer Course) had not 



PKEFACE 

been in whole or part previously published in peri- 
odicals. For over forty years from 1868 up to 
within a few months of his death in 1910, James 
wrote essays, articles, reviews, and letters almost 
continuously. Nor were these hastily written and 
subsequently revised. It was the author's habit 
to write well and finally when he did write; and 
then when he had something more to say, to write 
again. In other words there is a finished quality, 
both of style and of thought, in most of his periodi- 
cal writings. While many of these writings have 
already been collected, some by James himself, 
others since his death, these represent only a frac- 
tion of the whole. Among the periodical writings 
omitted from previous volumes are many which are 
of great value for the light which they throw upon 
James's own development and his relations with his 
contemporaries, as well as for their philosophical 
and psychological content. Scattered through vari- 
ous periodicals they can only with difficulty be con- 
sulted by the student, and are entirely inaccessible 
to the average reader. In addition to these the pres- 
ent volume contains a number of reviews which were 
originally published unsigned, and whose author- 
ship has not heretofore been announced. 

There are undoubtedly many devotees of James 
who will regret that James's scattered writings 
have not all been reprinted. As a matter of fact, 
many of the reviews contain little else than exposi- 
tory matter, many of the articles have been in sub- 
stance restated elsewhere, and many of the letters 

vi 



PREFACE 

and shorter writings are of such a nature as to be 
more suitable to a biography. Some of this last 
group are quoted or cited in the forthcoming 
Letters of William James. The editor is further 
reconciled to the omission of these three groups of 
writings by the fact that the Annotated Bibliog- 
raphy will serve to make them known and will 
enable a sufficiently eager reader to find them. 

There is one group of articles that has presented 
a peculiar problem, which has not been solved with- 
out misgivings. The three articles, "Are We Auto- 
mata?" Mind, 1879, "The Spatial Quale," Journal 
of Speculative Philosophy, 1879, and "On Some 
Omissions of Introspective Psychology," Mind, 
1881, are all psychological classics. Each deals 
with one of James's most original and important 
contributions to the subject. None of these was re- 
printed as a whole in the Principles of Psychology, 
and they have great historical interest as they 
stand. Nevertheless there is no important differ- 
ence between the content of these articles and that 
of those chapters of the Principles which deal with 
the same topics. Furthermore the preparation of 
the Annotated Bibliography has afforded the editor 
an opportunity of calling attention to them and of 
relating them to James's other writings. Hence, 
in view of their great length, it has been deemed 
best to omit them from the present volume. But at 
the same time several other articles of the same type 
have been included: "Spencer's Definition of Mind 
as Correspondence" because of its unique historical 

vii 



PREFACE 

importance, as perhaps the key to all of James's 
later thought; "The Sentiment of Rationality" be- 
cause of the light which it throws on James's phil- 
osophical sources; "The Feeling of Effort" because 
of its extreme inaccessibility in its present form; 
"What is an Emotion?" because, being written before 
the publication of Lange's work on the same subject, 
it throws important light on the question of priority 
respecting the famous "James-Lange theory." 

It would in some respects have been more satis- 
factory if the papers contained in the present vol- 
ume had been arranged in accordance with their 
subject-matter, or grouped under the headings 
"Philosophy," "Psychology," and "Psychical Re- 
search." But such a classification would have 
been entirely artificial and would have obscured the 
unity of the author's thought. Such papers as 
"Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence" or 
"The Sentiment of Rationality" are equally philo- 
sophical and psychological; at any rate, to group 
them as the one or the other would have been to 
put a certain construction on them instead of let- 
ting them speak for themselves. The chronological 
arrangement which has been adopted is convenient 
and colorless, and has the additional advantage of 
indicating the sequence of the author's intellectual 
development. 

In the preparation of this volume I have con- 
sulted many of James's friends, and while I am 
alone responsible for the ultimate selection, I haive 
been guided so far as possible by the judgment of 

viii 



PEEFACE 

those who were best qualified both by their interest 
in James and by their familiarity with the subject- 
matter of his writings. It gives me pleasure to 
acknowledge the help of Dr. E. B. Holt, Dr. R. M. 
Yerkes, Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, Judge T. M. Shackle- 
ford, Professor E. B. Titchener, Professor D. S. 
Miller, Dr. James R. Angell, Dr. H. M. Kallen, and 
Dr. Benjamin Rand. My colleagues, Professor H. S. 
Langfeld and Professor W. B. Cannon, have been 
especially generous of their time, and on certain 
technical matters beyond my competence their as- 
sistance has been invaluable. Finally, the under- 
taking would have been entirely impossible without 
the continuous encouragement and co-operation of 
Mr. Henry James. 

The recent reading and re-reading of all of James's 
known writings have impressed two things very 
deeply on my mind. First, there was one and only 
one James from the beginning to the end. With all 
of his versatility and openmindedness he remained 
unconsciously loyal to certain fundamental con- 
victions. It is even permissible to say that there 
is one germinal idea from which his whole thought 
grew, provided we do not overlook the even more 
important fact that his thought did grow. This 
germinal idea is the idea of the essentially active 
and interested character of the human mind. Sec- 
ond, I have been impressed as never before by 
James's extraordinary intellectual chivalry and 
hospitality, the reflection of his peculiar social 
genius. He was a man quick to reach to the heart 

ix 



PREFACE 

of another man, quick to praise, quick to esteem 
the gifts of others, even when, as sometimes hap- 
pened, no one else esteemed them at all. This grati- 
tude which James felt so genuinely and manifested 
with so much kindliness was not infrequently the 
foundation in others of their sustaining self-re- 
spect. Beginning with the older generation of 
his father and teachers, and ending with the 
younger generation of his children and students, his 
life was a continuous succession of marvellous hu- 
man discoveries. As it was with his personal inter- 
course, so it was in his relations with those whom 
he knew more remotely or only through their writ- 
ings. Most of these discoveries he has published 
to the world, in his prefaces and citations, or in 
those remarkable memorial addresses which have 
been reprinted in the Memories and Studies and 
which few men have known so well how to write. 
When, as in this volume, we view James's thought 
throughout its entire length, we find him moving 
steadily abreast of his time and welcoming new 
ideas with eagerness and relish down to the day of 
his death. But despite this fact he was somehow 
never swept off his feet. He was never fickle or 
vacillating, nor did his thought ever lose its highly 
personal and characteristic flavor. There are few 
intellectual histories in which quick enthusiasm and 
love of novelty are so perfectly balanced by steadi- 
ness and discipline. 

Ralph Barton Perry. 

Cambridge, Mass. 
May 24, 1920. 

X 



I 

SAKGENT'S "PLANCHETTE" * 

[1869] 

A reader of scientific habits of thought would 
have been more interested by a very few cases de- 
scribed by the author over his own signature, and 
with every possible detail given, in which pedanti- 
cally minute precautions had been taken against 
illusion of the senses or deceit. Of course it is quite 
natural that people who are comfortably in pos- 
session of a season-ticket over the Stygian ferry, 
and daily enjoying the privileges it confers of 
correspondence with the "summer-land," should 
grow out of all sympathy with the critical vigilance 
and suspicion about details which characterize 
the intellectual condition of the "Sadducees," as our 
author loves to call the earth-bound portion of the 
community. From his snug home in an atmosphere 
in which pianos float, "soft warm hands" bud forth 
from vacant space, and lead pencils write alone, the 
spiritualist has a right to feel a personal disdain 

1 Selected paragraphs comprising about one-half of an un- 
signed review of E. Sargent's Planchette: or the Despair of 
Science; which review was originally printed in Boston Daily 
Advertiser, March 10, 1869. The book offered a history and de- 
fense of modern spiritualism. In connection with the date of 
the review it is to be noted that the Society for Psychical Re- 
search was not founded until 1882. 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1869 3 

for the "scientific man" who stands inertly aloof in 
his pretentious enlightenment. Scientific men seem 
to demand that spiritualists should come and 
demonstrate to them the truth of their doctrine, 
by something little short of a surgical operation 
upon their intellects. But the spiritualist, from his 
point of view, is quite justified in leaving them for- 
ever on their "laws of nature," unconverted, since 
he in no way needs their countenance. 

But an author writing avowedly for purposes of 
propagandism should have recognized more fully 
the attitude of this class, and recollected that one 
narrative personally vouched for and minutely con- 
trolled, would be more apt to fix their attention, 
than a hundred of the striking but comparatively 
vaguely reported second-hand descriptions which 
fill many of the pages of this book. The present 
attitude of society on this whole question is as 
extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable 
to the pretensions of an age which prides itself on 
enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge. We 
see tens of thousands of respectable people on the 
one hand admitting as facts of every day certainty, 
what tens of thousands of others equally respect- 
able claim to be abject and contemptible delusion; 
while other tens of thousands are content to stand 
passively in the dark between these two hosts and 
in doubt, the matter meanwhile being — rightfully 
considered — one of really transcendent interest. In 
this state of things recrimination is merely lost 
time. Those people who have the interests of truth 



[1869] SARGENT'S "PLANCHETTE" 

at heart should remember that personal dignity is 
of very little comparative consequence. If our 
author, in concert with some good mediums, had 
instituted some experiments in which everything 
should be protected from the possibility of deceit, 
remembering that the morality of no one in such a 
case is to be taken for granted, and that such per- 
sonal precautions cannot be offensively construed, 
he would probably have made a better contribution 
to clearing up the subject than he has now done. 



II 

LEWES'S "PKOBLEMS OF LIFE AND 
MIND" x 

[1875] 

More problems! Why should we read them if 
they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes' s? 
Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical 
worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in 
permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than 
superfluous; and if (as is almost always the case 
with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by "in- 
dorsing" common-sense, and reinstating us in the 
possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, 
we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far 
round in order simply to return to our starting- 
point and be put back into the old harness. Is not 
the primal state of philosophic innocence, since 
the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of 
reflective enlightenment? And need we, provided 
we can stay at home and take the world for granted, 
undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such un- 
comfortable spirits as the present author, merely 
for the sake of coming to our own again, with noth- 
ing gained but the pride of having accompanied his 

I 1 Review of Problems of Life and Mind, by George Henry- 
Lewes, first series, 1875. Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly, 
1875, 36, 361-363. Ed.] 



[1875] LEWES'S PKOBLEMS 

expedition? So we may ask. But is the pride 
nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of 
utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter 
a man's motives in life, — which is untrue, — that it 
should add to their conscious completeness is 
enough to make thousands take upon themselves its 
burden of perplexities. We like the sense of com- 
panionship with better and more eager intelligences 
than our own, and that increment of self-respect 
which we all experience in passing from an instinc- 
tive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which 
hitherto we simply underwent. 

Mr. Lewes has drunk deep of the waters of skepti- 
cism that have of late years been poured out so 
freely in England, but he has worked his way 
through them into a constructive activity; and his 
work is only one of many harbingers of a reflux 
in the philosophic tide. All philosophic reflection 
is essentially skeptical at the start. To common- 
sense, and in fact to all living thought, matters ac- 
tually thought of are held to be absolutely and 
objectively as we think them. Every representation 
per se, and while it persists, is of something abso- 
lutely so. It becomes relative, flickering, insecure, 
only when reduced, only in the light of further con- 
sideration which we may bring forward to confront 
it with. This may be called its reductive. Now the 
reductive of most of our confident beliefs about 
Being is the reflection that they are our beliefs; 
that we are turbid media ; and that a form of being 
may exist uncontaminated by the touch of the fal- 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS C 1875 ] 

lacious knowing subject. In the light of this con- 
ception, the Being we know droops its head; but 
until this conception has been formed it knows no 
fear. The motive of most philosophies has been to 
find a position from which one could exorcise the 
reductive, and remain securely in possession of a 
secure belief. Ontologies do this by their concep- 
tion of "necessary" truth, i. e., a truth with no 
alternative; with a prwterea nihil, and not a plus 
ultra possibile; sl truth, in other words, whose only 
reductive would be the impossible, nonentity, or 
zero. 

In such conclusions as these philosophy re-joins 
hands with common-sense. For above all things 
common-sense craves for a stable conception of 
things. We desire to know what to expect. Once 
having settled down into an attitude towards life 
both as to its details and as a whole, an incalculable 
disturbance which might arise, disconcert all our 
judgments, and render our efforts vain, would be in 
the last degree undesirable. Now as a matter of 
fact we do live in a world from which as a rule we 
know what to expect. Whatever items we found to- 
gether in the past are likely to coexist in the future. 
Our confidence in this state of things deprives us of 
all sense of insecurity ; if we lay our plans rightly 
the world will fulfill its part of the contract. Com- 
mon-sense, or popular philosophy, explains this by 
what is called the judgment of Substance, that is, 
by the postulation of a persistent Nature, immut- 
able by time, behind each phenomenal group, which 

6 



[1875] LEWES'S PROBLEMS 

binds that group together and makes it what it is 
essentially and eternally. Even in regard to that 
mass of accidents which must be expected to occur 
in some shape but cannot be accurately prophesied 
in detail, we set our minds at rest, by saying that 
the world with all its events has a substantial 
cause; and when we call this cause God, Love, or 
Perfection, we feel secure that whatever the future 
may harbor, it cannot at bottom be inconsistent 
with the character of this term. So our attitude 
towards even the unexpected is in a general sense 
defined. 

Now this substantial judgment has been adopted 
by most dogmatic philosophies. They have ex- 
plained the collocations of phenomena by an im- 
mutable underlying nature or natures, beside or 
beyond which they have posited either the sphere 
of the Impossible, if they professed rationalism 
throughout, or merely a de facto Nonentity if they 
admitted the element of Faith as legitimate. But 
the skeptical philosophers who have of late pre- 
dominated in England have denied that the sub- 
stantial judgment is legitimate at all, and in so 
doing have seemed among other things to deny the 
legitimacy of the confidence and repose which it 
engenders. The habitual concurrence of the same 
phenomena is not a case of dynamic connection at 
all, they say. It may happen again — but we have 
no rational warrant for asserting that it must. 
The syntheses of data we think necessary are only 
so to us, from habit. The universe may turn inside 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1875 l 

preys on all other systems, may also in strict theo- 
retic legitimacy prey upon the ultimate data of Mr. 
Lewes's Positivism taken as a whole; even though 
all men should end by admitting that within the 
bounds of that empirical whole, his views of the 
necessary continuity between the parts were true. 
To this reduction by a plus ultra, Mr. Lewes can 
only retort by saying, "Foolishness ! So much on- 
tologic thirst is a morbid appetite." But in doing 
this he simply falls back on the act of faith of all 
positivisms. Weary of the infinitely receding chase 
after a theoretically warranted Absolute, they re- 
turn to their starting-point and break off there, like 
practical men, saying, "Physics, we espouse thee; 
for better or worse be thou our Absolute !" 

Skepticism, or unrest, in short, can always have 
the last word. After every definition of an object, 
reflection may arise, infect it with the cogito, and 
so discriminate it from the object in se. This is 
possible ad infinitum. That we do not all do it is 
because at a certain point most of us get tired of 
the play, resolve to stop, and assuming something 
for true, pass on to a life of action based on that. 

We wish that Mr. Lewes had emphasized this 
volitional moment in his Positivism. Although the 
consistent pyrrhonist is the only theoretically un- 
assailable man, it does not follow that he is the 
right man. Between us and the universe, there are 
no "rules of the game." The important thing is that 
our judgments should be right, not that they should 
observe a logical etiquette. There is a brute, blind 

10 



[1875] LEWES'S PEOBLEMS 

element in every thought which still has the vital 
heat within it and has not yet been reflected on. 
Our present thought always has it, we cannot es- 
cape it, and we for our part think philosophers had 
best acknowledge it, and avowedly posit their uni- 
verse, staking their persons, so to speak, on the 
truth of their position. In practical life we despise 
a man who will risk nothing, even more than one 
who will heed nothing. May it not be that in the 
theoretic life the man whose scruples about flawless 
accuracy of demonstration keep him forever shiver- 
ing on the brink of Belief is as great an imbecile as 
the man at the opposite pole, who simply consults 
his prophetic soul for the answer to everything? 
What is this but saying that our opinions about the 
nature of things belong to our moral life? 

Mr. Lewes's personal fame will now stand or fall 
by the credo he has published. We do not think the 
fame should suffer, even though we reserve our as- 
sent to important parts of the creed. The book is 
full of vigor of thought and felicity of style, in spite 
of its diffuseness and repetition. It will refute 
many of the objections made by critics to the first 
volume ; and will, we doubt not, be a most important 
ferment in the philosophic thought of the immediate 
future. 



11 



Ill 

GEKMAN PESSIMISM 1 

[1875] 

The German intellect is a far more complex 
affair than the English intellect, and a fortiori than 
the French or Italian. From sensualism to mysti- 
cism, from fatalistic quietism to the most ruthless 
practicality, there is hardly a mental quality or 
tendency which one will not find better represented 
in Germany than elsewhere ; save only one, and that 
is the quality of naivete or spontaneity. Every sub- 
ject of King William is, ex-officio, reflective and self- 
conscious, unable to surrender himself to any 
sentiment, however simple, till he has reflected on 
it and woven it into a systematic theory, or in other 
words transmuted it from an impulse into a princi- 
ple. Whatever the German feels or does, he does 
with malice prepense ; he justifies himself, by show- 
ing that the act or thought must rightfully flow 
from one in his position. Whether the position be 
that of a citizen properly filled with Nationalbe- 
wusstseifiy of a competitor in the egoistic struggle 
for existence, of a subject of the Categorical Im- 
perative, or of a Moment in the Weltprozess, is all 

[ 1 A review of Der Modern Pessimismus, by Dr. Edmund 
Pfleiderer. Berlin, 1875. Reprinted from Nation, 1875, 21, 
23&-2S4. Ed.] 

12 



[1875] GERMAN PESSIMISM 

one — we find everywhere that same cold-blooded 
self-corroboration and merging of the personal deed 
in universal considerations which, more than ma- 
terial spoliation and Draconian discipline, exasper- 
ated the French during the late invasion, and have 
made them call the Germans "hypocrites" ever 
since. 

Perhaps as striking an illustration of this over- 
weening tendency to theorize as can be found is 
afforded by the popular German school of pessi- 
mistic philosophy, of which Professor Pfleiderer's 
pamphlet is the latest and one of the ablest criti- 
cisms. In other countries, aristocratic misan- 
thropes, dyspeptic pleasure-seekers, and unappreci- 
ated geniuses have existed, and their utterances 
never passed beyond the sphere of splenetic or 
pathetic individuality. Souls with an unassuage- 
able love of justice and harmony have also existed, 
and their utterances, like Leopardi's and Shelley's, 
have been lyrical cries of defiance or despair, which 
perished with them. It was reserved for Schopen- 
hauer to show his countrymen that the cursing and 
melting moods could be kept alive permanently, 
and extended indefinitely by making proper theo- 
retic deliberation; and Schopenhauer's disciple 
Hartmann, whose work, the Philosophie des Unbe- 
wussten, has met with one of the greatest literary 
successes of the time, and carried the new gospel 
into regions where the torch of metaphysics had 
never yet begun to glimmer, has made everything so 
simple and perfect in his system, that all who have 

13 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1875 ! 

a quarrel with destiny, whether peevish or tragic, 
can be housed there side by side, without altering 
their mode of life or losing any of their "home com- 
forts" in the process of cure. For it would be un- 
pardonable in these philosophers to preach disgust 
with life unless the disgust were likely to lead the 
way to a cure. Existence being of course the original 
sin of that substance or essence of things which 
Schopenhauer calls "Will," and to which Yon Hart- 
mann gives the name of "the Unconscious," anni- 
hilation or nirvana is of course the cure. And in 
both philosophies this may be attained through the 
thorough and final intellectual persuasion of the 
vanity of all the goods of life and the consequent 
extinction of every desire. 

But here begins the divergence. The aristocratic 
master has no hopes of the human or any other 
race as a whole, and his nirvana is restricted to the 
few who are ascetics and saints. In the witty 
words of Pfleiderer, the battle-cry with which he 
plunges into life's fray and rallies his followers 
about him is the well-known "sauve qui peut." The 
pupil, on the contrary, equipped with a Berlin edu- 
cation and imbued with notions of evolution and 
progress which to Schopenhauer (who wrote before 
Darwin) were profoundly distasteful, provides for 
a collective salvation, based on no less a perform- 
ance than a unanimous resolve on the part of all 
sentient beings, penetrated at last through and 
through with tedium vitw, and despair of gaining 
anything by fighting it out on the line of existence — 

14 



[1875] GERMAN PESSIMISM 

to stop, and back out of it, when this world will 
cease at any rate. Whether there will ever be 
another world depends wholly on whether the 
wicked old "Unconscious" chooses again to emerge 
from its state of mere potentiality; and as it is 
being without rhyme or reason, a mere orutum, the 
chances for and against that unlucky eventuality 
are just even, or expressed in mathematical lan- 
guage by the fraction one-half. Schopenhauer's 
philosophy, says Hartmann, is one of despair. So 
far is this from being the worst of all possible 
worlds, that it is the best, for it tends invincibly 
to the summum bonum of extinction. Let no man 
then desert the ranks, but each labor in the Lord's 
vineyard, sneering, lamenting, and cursing as he 
pleases, getting indigestion himself, and begetting 
young, to inoculate them with a disgust greater 
than his own, and co-operating so with the grand 
movement of things which is bound to culminate 
in deliverance. Above all, let us have no standing 
aloof and trying prematurely to save one's individ- 
ual self, like Schopenhauer's ascetics. This delight- 
fully unselfish submission to epicurean practice in 
the midst of pessimistic theory is Hartmann's 
cleverest stroke. As in Beranger's song : 

"Nous laisserions finir le monde 
Si nos f emmes le voulaient bien !" 

Schopenhauer was truly a bungler. But, joking 
apart, the reader can easily see how little living 
seriousness Hartmann possesses. He seems to us 

15 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1875 3 

to have a clever journalistic mind, with a Prussian 
education, ready for any paradox which will make 
a sensation, and without a grain of that auctoritas 
which belongs to the sombre and impressive genius 
of his teacher. 

The latter is assuredly one of the greatest of 
writers. When such a one expatiates upon the texts 
of Homo homini lupus and Woman the focus of the 
world's illusion, he will have all the cynics with 
a taste for good literature for his admirers. And 
when he preaches compassion to be the one cardinal 
virtue, and morbidly reiterates the mystic Sanskrit 
motto, Tat twan asi — This [maniac or cripple] art 
thou — as the truth of truths, he will of course exert 
a spell over persons in the unwholesome sentimental 
moulting- time of youth. But the thing which to our 
Anglo-Saxon mind seems so outlandish is that 
crowds of dapper fellows, revelling in animal spirits 
and conscious strength, should enroll themselves in 
cold blood as his permanent apostles, and feel as 
sorely when their pessimism is attacked as the 
fabled old dead inmate of the almshouse did when, 
not good enough for heaven, she was also shut out 
from hell, and sat on the road and wept that she 
should have to return to Tewkesbury. 

For, however it may stand with Tewkesbury, in 
the world at large, practically considered, optimism 
is just as true as pessimism. These Germans can 
attain their absolute luxury of woe only by speaking 
of things transcendentally and metaphysically. As 
far as the outward animal life goes, the existence 

16 



[1875] GERMAN PESSIMISM 

of a Walt Whitman confounds Schopenhauer quite 
as thoroughly as the existence of a Leopardi refutes 
Dr. Pangloss; and Hartmann's elaborate indict- 
ment of the details of life is precisely on a par in 
point of logic with the "wisdom and beneficence" 
philosophy of the most edifying and gelatinous 
Sunday-school orator. Common-sense contents it- 
self with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs 
when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, 
in short, a practical compromise, without trying a 
theoretical solution. This attitude is of course re- 
spectable. But if one must needs have an ultimate 
theoretical solution, nothing is more certain than 
this, that no one need assent to that of pessimism 
unless he freely prefer to do so. Concerning the 
metaphysical world, or the ultimate meaning of 
things, there is no outward evidence — nothing but 
conceptions of the possible. Distinct among these is 
that of a moral order whose life may be fed by the 
contradictions of good and evil that occur in the ex- 
ternal phenomenal order. Those empiricists who 
are celebrating nowadays with such delight the 
novel mathematical notion of a fourth or "tran- 
scendental" dimension in space, should be the last 
persons to dogmatize against the possibility of a 
deeper dimension in being than the flat surface- 
pattern which is offered by its pleasures and pains, 
taken merely as such. Now, if such an order in the 
world is possibly true, and if, supposing it to be 
true, it may afford the basis for an ultimate opti- 
mism (quite distinct from mere nerveless senti- 

17 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1875 ^ 

mentalism), there is no reason which should deter 
a person bent on having some commanding theory 
of life from adopting it as his hypothesis or working 
faith. He may of course prefer pessimism, but only 
at the price of a certain internal inconsistency. 
(We purposely neglect to consider dogmatic ma- 
terialism here.) For pessimism is really only con- 
sistent with a strictly dogmatic attitude. It is 
fatalistic in the thorough Oriental sense, being by 
its very definition a theory from which one is bound 
to escape, if he can. Its account of things is con- 
fessedly abhorrent, and nothing but coercive out- 
ward evidence should make one stay within its pale. 
Now, a hypothetical door like that offered by the 
notion of a ransoming moral order "behind the veil" 
is better than no loophole of escape; and to refuse 
to give one's self the benefit of its presence argues 
either a perfectly morbid appetite for dogmatic 
forms of thought, or an astounding lack of genuine 
sense for the tragic, which sense undoubtedly 
varies, like every other, from man to man. 

With transcendental optimism, on the other 
hand, it is just the reverse. If it is true, why, then, 
there is the deepest internal congruity in its not 
being mechanically forced on our belief. As a 
fatalistic nolens-volens creed, it would be devoid of 
all moral character. Or rather, we may not talk of 
its being true, but becoming true. Its full verifi- 
cation must be contingent on our complicity, both 
theoretical and practical. All that it asserts is 
that the facts of the world are a fit basis for the 

18 



[1875] GERMAN PESSIMISM 

summum honum, if we do our share and react upon 
them as it is meant we should (with fortitude, for 
example, and undismayed hope). The world is 
thus absolutely good only in a potential or hypo- 
thetic sense, and the hypothetic form of the opti- 
mistic belief is the very signature of its consistency, 
and first condition of its probability. At the final 
integration of things, the world's goodness will be 
an accomplished fact and self-evident, but, till then, 
faith is the only legitimate attitude of mind it can 
claim from us. 

So plain is all this that the pessimistic contro- 
versy has far more of an ethnic than a philosophic 
interest for us. We are only sorry that, at this 
distance, the data are too few for us to see what its 
full ethnic import is. If it simply result in con- 
firming in Germany the tonic creed that there 
comes a time when every good, however precious, is 
fit for nothing but destruction, for the sake of a 
higher good, and that passive felicity is a dream, it 
can do no harm. Dr. Pfleiderer's pamphlet, which 
takes substantially the same ground as we do, is 
both temperate and witty, and may be cordially 
recommended to those interested in the subject. 



19 



IV 

CHAUNCEY WEIGHT 1 

[1875] 

The death which we briefly noticed last week re- 
minds us most sadly of the law, that to be an effec- 
tive great man one needs to have many qualities 
great. If power of analytic intellect pure and 
simple could suffice, the name of Chauncey Wright 
would assuredly be as famous as it is now obscure, 
for he was not merely the great mind of a village — 
if Cambridge will pardon the expression — but 
either in London or Berlin he would, with equal 
ease, have taken the place of master which he held 
with us. The reason why he is now gone without 
leaving any work which his friends can consider as 
a fair expression of his genius, is that his shyness, 
his want of ambition, and to a certain degree his 
indolence, were almost as exceptional as his power 
of thought. Had he, in early life, resolved to con- 

i 1 Reprinted from Nation, 1875, 21, 194. James acknowledged 
bis indebtedness to Wright's "intellectual companionship in old 
times," in the Preface to the Principles of Psychology, I, p. vii. 
He borrowed the expression cosmical "weather," in Will to 
Believe, p. 52. There are important points of resemblance be- 
tween Wright and C. S. Pedrce, to whom James gives the credit 
for pragmatism. Wright's death occurred on September 12, 
1875, in his forty-fifth year. His Philosophical Discussions 
have been collected and edited with a biography by 0. E. 
Norton, New York, 1877. Ed.] 

20 



[1875] CHAUNCEY WRIGHT 

centrate these and make himself a physicist, for 
example, there is no question but that his would 
have ranked to-day among the few first living 
names. As it was, he preferred general criticism 
and contemplation, and became something resem- 
bling more a philosopher of the antique or Socratic 
type than a modern Gelehrter. His best work has 
been done in conversation; and in the acts and 
writings of the many friends he influenced his spirit 
will, in one way or another, as the years roll on, be 
more operative than it ever was in direct produc- 
tion. Born at Northampton in 1830, graduating at 
Harvard in 1852, he left us in the plenitude of his 
powers. His outward work is limited to various 
articles in the North American Review (one of 
which Mr. Darwin thought important enough to re- 
print as a pamphlet in England), a paper or two 
in the Transactions of the Academy of Arts and 
Sciences, and a number of critical notices in our 
own pages — the latest of these being the article en^ 
titled "German Darwinism," which we 1 published 
only two weeks ago. As a writer, he was defective 
in the shaping faculty — he failed to emphasize the 
articulations of his argument, to throw a high 
light, so to speak, on the important points ; so that 
many a casual peruser has probably read on and 
never noticed the world of searching consequences 
which lurked involved in some inconspicuously 
placed word. He spent many years in computing 
for the Nautical Almanac and from time to time 

1 The Nation. 
21 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1875 ^ 

accepted some pedagogic work. He gave a course 
of University lectures on psychology in Harvard 
College in 1871, and last year he conducted there a 
course in mathematical physics. As little of a reader 
as an educated man well can be, he yet astonished 
every one by his omniscience, for no specialist could 
talk with Chauncey Wright without receiving some 
sort of instruction in his specialty. This was due 
to his irrepressible spontaneous habit of subtle 
thinking. Every new fact he learned set his whole 
mental organism in motion, and reflection did not 
cease till the novel thought was firmly woven with 
the entire system of his knowledge. Of course in 
this process new conclusions were constantly 
evolved, and many a man of science who hoped to 
surprise him with news of a discovery has been him- 
self surprised by finding it already constructed by 
Wright from data separately acquired in this or 
that conversation with one or other of the many 
scholars of Cambridge or Boston, most of whom he 
personally knew so well. 

In philosophy, he was a worker on the path 
opened by Hume, and a treatise on psychology writ- 
ten by him (could he have been spared and induced 
to undertake the drudgery) would probably have 
been the last and most accomplished utterance of 
what he liked to call the British school. He would 
have brought the work of Mill and Bain for the 
present to a conclusion. Of the two motives to 
which philosophic systems owe their being, the crav- 
ing for consistency or unity in thought, and the de- 

22 



[1875] CHAUNCEY WRIGHT 

sire for a solid outward warrant for our emotional 
ends, his mind was dominated only by the former. 
Never in a human head was contemplation more 
separated from desire. Schopenhauer, who denned 
genius as a cognitive faculty manumitted from the 
service of the will, would have found in him an even 
stronger example of his definition than he cared to 
meet. For to Wright's mode of looking at the uni- 
verse such ideas as pessimism or optimism were 
alike simply irrelevant. Whereas most men's inter- 
est in a thought is proportioned to its possible re- 
lation to human destiny, with him it was almost the 
reverse. When the mere actuality of phenomena 
will suffice to describe them, he held it pure excess 
and superstition to speak of a metaphysical whence 
or whither, of a substance, a meaning, or an end. 
Just as in cosmogony he preferred Mayer's theory 
to the nebular hypothesis, and in one of his earliest 
North American Review articles used the happy 
phrase, "cosmical weather," to describe the irregu- 
lar dissipation and aggregation of worlds; so, in 
contemplating the totality of being, he preferred to 
think of phenomena as the result of a sort of on- 
tologic weather, without inward rationality, an 
aimless drifting to and fro, from the midst of which 
relatively stable and so (for us) rational combina- 
tions may emerge. The order we observe in things 
needs explanation only on the supposition of a pre- 
liminary or potential disorder ; and this he pointed 
out is, as things actually are orderly, a gratuitous 
notion. Anaxagoras, who introduced into philos- 

23 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1875 ] 

ophy the notion of the vou? ? also introduced with it 
that of an antecedent chaos. But if there be no es- 
sential chaos, Mr. Wright used to say, an anti- 
chaotic vou? is superfluous. He particularly con- 
demned the idea of substance as a metaphysical 
idol. When it was objected to him that there must 
be some principle of oneness in the diversity of 
phenomena — some glue to hold them together and 
make a universe out of their mutual independence, 
he would reply that there is no need of a glue to 
join things unless we apprehend some reason 
why they should fall asunder. Phenomena are 
grouped — more we cannot say of them. This no- 
tion that the actuality of a thing is the absolute 
totality of its being was perhaps never grasped by 
any one with such thoroughness as by him. 

However different a philosophy one may hold 
from his, however one may deem that the lack of 
emotional bias which left him contented with the 
mere principle of parsimony as a criterion of uni- 
versal truth was really due to a defect in the active 
or impulsive part of his mental nature, one must 
value none the less his formulae For as yet philos- 
ophy has celebrated hardly any stable achievements. 
The labors of philosophers have, however, been con- 
fined to deepening enormously the philosophic 
consciousness, and revealing more and more mi- 
nutely and fully the import of metaphysical prob- 
lems. In this preliminary task ontologists and 
phenomenalists, mechanists and teleologists, must 
join friendly hands, for each has been indispensable 

24 



[1875] CHAUNCEY WRIGHT 

to the work of the other, and the only foe of 
either is the common foe of both — namely, the 
practical, conventionally thinking man, to whom, 
as has been said, nothing has trne seriousness but 
personal interests, and whose dry earnestness in 
those is only excelled by that of the brute, which 
takes everything for granted and never laughs. 

Mr. Wright belonged to the precious band of gen- 
uine philosophers, and among them few can have 
been as completely disinterested as he. Add to this 
eminence his tireless amiability, his beautiful mod- 
esty, his affectionate nature and freedom from 
egotism, his childlike simplicity in worldly affairs, 
and we have the picture of a character of which his 
friends feel more than ever now the elevation and 
the rarity. 



25 



BAIN AND KENOUVIEK 1 

[1876] 

Philosophy and psychology are such difficult 
studies that most of us may be said to read in the 
works of philosophers rather than to read them. 
We like, as it were, physically to rub our minds 
against the abstract problems in their pages; we 
enjoy the glimpses we get of their solution; but we 
grasp nothing but the concrete illustrations by the 
way and the explanations of details the author may 
give us. Accordingly, the more fertile a philosopher 
is in these, the more popular he will become. The 
two philosophers of indubitably the widest influ- 

[* Review of The Emotions and the Will, by Alexander Bain, 
third edition, New York, 1876 ; and Essais de Critique ge'ne'rale, 
by Charles Renouvier, second edition, Paris, 1875. Reprinted 
from Nation, 1876, 22, 367-369. Bain was born in 1818 and 
died in 1903. James and Renouvier were for many years con- 
nected by bonds of friendship and mutual admiration. On 
James's part this admiration continued up to the time of his 
death. The posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy was 
dedicated to Renouvier in accordance with the author's express 
wish, James having left on record the following statement of 
his indebtedness : "Pie [Renouvier] was one of the greatest of 
philosophical characters, and but for the decisive impression 
made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of 
pluralism, I might never have got free from the monistic super- 
stition under which I had grown up" (Some Problems of Phi- 
losophy, p. 165, note). Cf. also ibid., p. 163; Will to Believe, 
p. 143 ; and below, p. 98. Renouvier was born in 1815, and died 
in full intellectual vigor in 1903. Ed.] 

26 



[1876] BAIN AND RENOUVIER 

ence in England and America since Mill's death are 
Messrs. Bain and Spencer, who have little in com- 
mon except the tendency to explain things by physi- 
cal reasons as much as possible, and this abundance 
of illustrative fact; whilst Mr. Hodgson, a writer 
in our opinion vastly more thorough and original 
than either, is unread and unknown because in his 
books the concatenation of the thoughts is every- 
thing, and the illustrative instances subordinate. 
The thoroughness of the descriptive part of Bain's 
treatises, and the truly admirable sagacity of many 
of the psychological analyses and reductions they 
contain, has made them deservedly classical. It 
seems hardly worth while to devote our space to 
giving an account of the third edition of one of 
them, for every one interested in psychology must 
read the originals themselves. We propose, there- 
fore, merely to use Mr. Bain for the purpose of giv- 
ing greater relief to the merits of a French philos- 
opher, Renouvier, who seems as yet unknown to 
English readers, but who has given to the philos- 
ophy which Bain represents a form in our opinion 
far more clear, perfect, and consistent than has 
been attained by any English writer. 

For Bain is not only a psychologist proper, does 
not merely describe mental facts as items in the 
inventory of nature, but also speculates about na- 
ture as a whole. The fault we find in him in this 
capacity is his fragmentariness and consequent in- 
consistency. Fragmentariness — the willingness to 
settle only so much of a subject at a time as is 

27 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS E 1876 l 

practically needful — has become such a tradition in 
the history of the British mind, that philosophers 
who, like Spencer, are thoroughly systematic and 
constructive in their form, are viewed with sus- 
picion and dislike on that very account by many 
minds of Anglo-Saxon type. This is surely a 
vicious extreme, for the very impulse to which 
philosophies owe their being is the craving for a 
consistent completeness; and every powerful at- 
tempt to rear a thorough system of thought has an 
intellectual style about it which is, aesthetically 
considered, to say the least, far nobler than the 
slouchy dumping of materials to which Mr. Bain 
treats us. 

The most important of these fragmentary British 
contributions to philosophy are the criticisms and 
negations called nominalism and nihilism. To- 
gether they form the positivism, empiricism, or 
phenomenalism which within a certain sphere are 
so congenial to the Anglo-Saxon mind. They assert 
that nothing has reality except actual particular 
facts. Such noumenal substances as matter, nature, 
power, are admitted alike by metaphysics and by 
popular philosophy or common sense ; but criticism 
scrutinizes them only to proclaim that they are ab- 
solutely void of meaning except as names descrip- 
tive of particular phenomena. Describe these com- 
pletely, and you have named all there is. If the 
particulars will happen just so each time, the as- 
sumption of a "substance" to produce them is mere 
image-worship — a fifth wheel to a coach. Accord- 

28 



[1876] BAIN AND RENOUVIER 

ingly, the school of Mill and Bain regard the world 
as a mere sum of separate phenomena or representa- 
tions which habitually group themselves into cer- 
tain orders, with which we grow more or less 
familiar, and which consequently seem more or less 
rational and necessary. To account for the par- 
ticular habits of grouping, or "laws" of nature 
and of mind, is on this theory the next problem. 
The English school has always tried more or less to 
evade this part of the subject, and, reducing the 
principles of grouping to as small a number as pos- 
sible (e.g., space and causality to time), it has 
treated what remained in a hazy sort of manner, as 
not worthy of much attention anyhow. M. Renou- 
vier's polemic against the metaphysical notions of 
Substance, of Infinite in existence, and of abstract 
ideas seems to us more powerful than anything 
which has been written in English; but he differs 
from his English allies in giving as great an empha- 
sis to the laws of grouping as to the phenomena 
grouped. The laws are for him equally with the 
phenomena absolute and distinct. In fact, a "phe- 
nomenon" apart from its group, law, or function 
is an inconceivable nonentity. 

But his great point of divergence from Bain and 
Mill lies in his treatment of the problem of Free- 
dom, and here, it seems to us, is shown the advan- 
tage of a systematically-thought philosophy over 
one fragmentarily fed from heterogeneous sources. 
We have no space to discuss the sources of the Eng- 
lish prejudice in favor of psychical determinism. 

29 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 1876 1 

Every reader of Mill's Autobiography will remem- 
ber the striking passage in which he narrates the 
hypochondria which this doctrine produced in his 
youthful mind. It is the strongest proof of the es- 
sentially pious character of that mind that this in- 
herited belief was clung to in spite of its not being 
logically called for by the rest of Mill's philosophic 
creed. For if any man may believe in free-will it is 
surely one who repudiates the notion of an infinite 
pre-existing substance from which "the remediless 
flux of existence" proceeds, and who denies that 
there is any real coerciveness in the relation of cause 
to effect. Both these denials were Mill's. M. Re- 
nouvier most justly insists that the only logical 
enemy of free-will is the doctrine of Substance or 
Pantheism. Spencer, for example, with his "Un- 
knowable," is bound in honor to oppose it; but the 
opposition of Bain, who seems to hold to the ulti- 
mate distinctness of each phenomenon, and with 
the ultimate inexplicability of their order of suc- 
cession, can only be regarded as a caprice. 

Renouvier at a stroke clears the question of a 
cloud of quibbles by stating it in simple phenomenal 
terms. For him it is merely a question as to the 
ambiguity of certain futures, those human acts, 
namely, which are preceded by deliberation. What 
are the phenomena here? A representation arises 
in a mind, but ere it can discharge itself into a train 
of action, it is inhibited by another which confronts 
it. This, on the point of discharging itself, is again 
checked by the first, which returns with a reinforced 

30 



[1876] BAIN AND RENOUVIER 

intensity, and so for a time the pendulum swings to 
and fro, till finally one or the other representation 
recurs with such a degree of reinforcement that the 
tumult ceases, and an act, a decision for the future, 
or the arrest of a passionate impulse takes place. 
This stable survival of one representation is called a 
volition. The whole question of its predetermina- 
tion relates to the intensity of the degree of re- 
inforcement with which the triumphant representa- 
tion recurs. As a matter of fact, in critical cases 
(which are the only cases bearing on the question) 
this intensity's utterly unknown beforehand. Is it 
potentially and essentially a knowable quantity? 
If not, our acts are in certain cases original com- 
mencements of series of phenomena, whose realiza- 
tion excludes other series which were previously 
possible. If so, they form part of an adamantine 
and eternal uniformity. But who shall decide? The 
argumentation of Bain that as a matter of fact men 
always do expect each other to act with predictable 
uniformity is — sit venia veroo — rubbish. It could 
never be urged by one who was not already on other 
grounds prejudiced in favor of determinism. In one 
of his earliest works, Helmholtz, who as well as any 
living man may claim to give voice to the scientific 
spirit, says that when the proximate causes of 
phenomena are alterable themselves, we must seek 
further for a cause of their alteration, and so on till 
we reach an unalterable principle. 

"Now, whether [he continues], all events are to be 
carried back to such causes, whether nature be fully 

31 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1876 ^ 

explicable, or whether changes occur in it which do 
not fall under the law of necessary causality, and do 
consequently belong to the realm of freedom or spon- 
taneity, cannot now be decided. It is, at all events, clear 
that a science whose object it is to understand nature 
must start with the assumption of her intelligibility, 
and conclude and enquire according to this assumption 
until it at last is forced by irrefutable facts to the ad- 
mission of its own limitations." 

The "assumption" of a fixed law in natural 
science is thus, according to this authority, an in- 
tellectual postulate, just as the assumption of an 
ultimate law of indetermination might be a moral 
postulate in treating of certain human delibera- 
tions. Is each assumption true in its sphere, or is 
determinism universal? Since no man can decide 
empirically, must one remain for ever uncertain, 
or shall one anticipate evidence and boldly choose 
one's side? Apart from the fact that doubt is prac- 
tically impossible in certain cases which touch the 
conduct of life, doubt itself is an active state, one of 
voluntary inhibition or suspense. So that which- 
ever plan one adopts, one's state is the result of 
other facts than pure receptivity of intelligence. 
The entire nature of the man, intellectual, affective, 
and volitional, is (whether avowedly or not) ex- 
hibited in the theoretic attitude he takes in such a 
question as this. And this leads M. Renouvier to a 
most vigorous and original discussion of the ulti- 
mate grounds of certitude, of belief in general, from 
which he returns to make his decision about this 
particular point. All yard-stick criteria of certi- 

32 



[1876] BAIN AND RENOUVIER 

tude have failed. Mr. Spencer's "inconceivability 
of the opposite" breaks down from the practical im- 
possibility of nnanimity in any given case. When 
the Philosopher of Evolution says we ought to find ' 
the opposite of his First Principles inconceivable 
and dubs us "pseudo" thinkers if we do not, he 
simply begs the question and appeals to the author- 
ity of his personal insight as against ours. Now, 
says Renouvier, such an appeal is at bottom 
inevitable so soon as we leave the narrow standing- 
point of the present moment in consciousness 
(Pyrrhonism). This latter alone is the aliquid 
inconcussum, philosophers have sought; but it is 
barren. Beyond it everywhere is doubt. 

"The radical sign of will, the essential mark of that 
achieved development which makes man capable of spec- 
ulating on all things and raises him to his dignity of 
an independent and autonomous being, is the possibility 
of doubt. . . . The ignorant man doubts little, the fool 
still less, the madman not at all. . . . Certitude is not 
and cannot be an absolute condition. It is, what is too 
often forgotten, a state and an act of man ... a state 
in which he posits his consciousness, such as it is, and 
stands by it. Properly speaking, there is no certitude ; 
all there is is men who are certain. . . . Certitude is 
thus nothing but belief ... a moral attitude." 

Thus in every wide theoretical conclusion we 
must seem more or less arbitrarily to choose our 
side. Of course the choice may at bottom be pre- 
determined in each case, but also it may not. This 
brings us back to our theoretical dilemma about 

33 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS l 187 ^ 

freedom, concerning which we must now bow to the 
necessity of making a choice; for suspense itself 
would be a choice, and a most practical one, since 
by it we should forfeit the possible benefits of boldly 
espousing a possible truth. If this be a moral world, 
there are cases in which any indecision about its 
being so must be death to the soul. Now, if our 
choice is predetermined, there is an end of the mat- 
ter ; whether predetermined to the truth of fatality 
or the delusion of liberty, is all one for us. But if 
our choice is truly free, then the only possible way 
of getting at that truth is by the exercise of the free- 
dom which it implies. Here the act of belief and 
the object of belief coalesce, and the very essential 
logic of the situation demands that we wait not for 
any outward sign, but, with the possibility of doubt- 
ing open to us, voluntarily take the alternative of 
faith. Renouvier boldly avows the full conditions 
under which alone we can be right if freedom is 
true, and says: "Let our liberty pronounce on its 
own real existence." It and necessity being alike 
indemonstrable by any quasi-material process, must 
be postulated if taken at all. 

"I prefer to affirm my liberty and to affirm it by 
means of my liberty. . . . My moral and practical certi- 
tude begins logically by the certitude of my freedom, 
just as practically my freedom has always had to inter- 
vene in the constitution of my speculative certitude." 

Others need not decide in the same way, but let 
them confess, if their way is determinism, that un- 

34 



[1876] BAm AND RENOUVIER 

less they deduce it a priori from the existence of a 
metaphysical substance, they choose it just as our 
author chooses his way, because on the whole they 
prefer it. This fact is usually unconsciously smug- 
gled out of sight; but, concealed or expressed, it 
debars either side from protesting on grounds of 
logical method, or form of procedure, against the 
other. The protest must come from extra-logical 
considerations; and the ultimate decision of which 
side is right and which wrong shall only be reached 
ambulando or at the final integration of things, if at 
all. Of course, freedom thus carried into the very 
heart of our theoretic activity becomes the corner- 
stone of our author's philosophy, and by its use he i 
thinks a the minimum of faith produces the maxi- 
mum of result." 



35 



VI 
KENAN'S "DIALOGUES" 1 

[1876] 

"Encore une 6toile qui file ; 
File, file, et disparait I" 

This last production of a writer who at one time 
seemed, to say the least, the most exquisite literary 
genius of France, is really sad reading for any one 
who would gladly be assured that that country is 
robust and fertile still. It seems to us no less than 
an example of mental ruin — the last expression of 
a nature in which the seeds of insincerity and 
foppishness, which existed at the start alongside of 
splendid powers, have grown up like rank weeds 
and smothered the better possibilities. The dia- 
logues which form the only new part of the book 
are simply priggishness rampant, an indescribable 
unmanliness of tone compounded of a sort of his- 
trionically sentimental self-conceit, and a nerveless 
and boneless fear of what will become of the uni- 
verse if "l'homme vulgaire" is allowed to go on. M. 
Kenan's idea of God seems to be that of a power to 
whom one may successfully go like a tell-tale child 
and say: "Please, won't you make 'l'homme vul- 

C 1 Review of Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques, by- 
Ernest Renan, Paris, 1876. Reprinted with omissions from 
Nation, 1876, 28, 78-79. Ed.] 

36 



[1876] KENAN'S "DIALOGUES" 

gaire' stop?" As the latter waxes every day more 
fat and insolent, the belief in God burns dim, and 
is replaced by the idea of a kind of cold-blooded des- 
tiny whose inscrutable and inhuman purposes we 
are blindly serving, with at most the relief of mak- 
ing piquant guesses and epigrams as we go, about 
our Master and ourselves. 

The other papers in the volume show the same 
qualities and defects — sweetness of diction and 
delicacy of apprehension in detail, with vagueness, 
pretension, and deep ignorance of the subject 
where the subject is the history of philosophic 
thought. The best excuse one can make for them is 
that they are but half sincere. But, in a writer of 
Kenan's peculiar pretensions, that is a fatal excuse. 
In his earlier writings all the suavities and many 
of the severities of language were employed in 
painting the distinction between the "ame d' elite," 
the "esprit honnete," and the common man; how 
the latter was wedded to superficiality and pas- 
sive enjoyment, whilst the former found austere 
"joys of the soul" in the pursuit of wisdom 
and virtue. These surely imply sincerity. The 
gifted writer particularly congratulated himself 
on having preserved the vigor of his soul "dans 
un pays eteint, en un siecle sans esperance. . • . 
Consolons nous," he cried, "par nos chimeres, par 
notre noblesse, par notre dedain !" "The true atheist 
is the frivolous man" is one of his early phrases 
which has been often quoted. But already in his 

37 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1873 ^ 

Antichrist, published after the Commune, he spoke 
of the summit of wisdom being the persuasion that 
at bottom all is vanity; and if this book be really 
half trifling, he would seem practically to have 
espoused that persuasion — in other words, to have 
become a frivolous man, or, according to his own 
definition, an atheist. Indeed, if one were to seek 
a single phrase which should define the essence of 
religion, it would be the phrase: all is not vanity. 
The solace and anaesthetic which lies in the conclu- 
sion of Ecclesiastes is good for many of us ; but M. 
Kenan's ostentatious pretension to an exquisite sort 
of religious virtue has debarred him from the right 
to enjoy its comforts. That esprit vulgaire, Josh 
Billings, says that if you have $80,000 at interest, 
and own the house you live in, it is not much trouble 
to be a philosopher. M. Kenan, after parading be- 
fore our envious eyes in fine weather the spectacle 
of a man savourer-ing his dedain and enjoying the 
exquisitely voluptuous sensation of tasting his own 
spiritual pre-eminence, must not take it hard if we 
insist on a little more courage in him when the wind 
begins to blow. We do not know any better than he 
what the Democratic religion which is invading the 
Western world has in store for us. We dislike the 
"Commune" as well as he ; but it is a fair presump- 
tion that the cards of humanity have not all been 
played out. And meanwhile, since no one has any 
authoritative information about the final upshot of 
things, and yet, since all men have a mighty desire 
to get on if they can, it cannot be too often repeated 

38 



[1876] KENAN'S "DIALOGUES" 

that they will all use the practical standard in 
measuring the excellence of their brother men : not 
the man of the most delicate sensibility but he who 
on the whole is the most helpful man will be reck- 
oned the best man. The political or spiritual hero 
will always be the one who, when others crumbled, 
stood firm till a new order built itself around him ; 
who showed a way out and beyond where others 
could only see written "no thoroughfare." M. 
Kenan's dandified despair has nothing in common 
with this type. 



39 



VII 
LEWES'S "PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND" 1 

[1877] 

Those readers whom the superiority of the sec- 
ond volume of Mr. Lewes's Problems over the first 
has led to expect an even crescendo of excellence in 
that ponderous and somewhat pretentious publica- 
tion, will be much disappointed after reading this 
third instalment. The diffuseness and damnable 
iteration are there as much as ever, but the new 
truths hang fire and fail to appear. It seems in- 
deed as if the author had started to write rather 
with a vague aspiration after some truth than a 
distinct apprehension of any, and were letting his 
pen run on in the persuasion that a great discovery 
would surely trickle out of it, if only the scythe of 
Chronos might not cut him short. This is truly an 
excellent way of making discoveries, but usually it 
is the discovery that we publish, while the process 
is suppressed. Mr. Lewes has given us the process 
in five hundred pages, and — let us charitably say — 
reserved the discovery for the next volume. Con- 
stantly he seems on the point of making it. An un- 

[* Opening paragraph of a review of G. H. Lewes's Physical 
Basis of Mind, 1877, the sequel to the book reviewed above, 
p. 4. Reprinted with omissions from Nation, 1877, 25, 290. 
Ed.] 

40 



[1877] LEWES'S "BASIS OF MIND" 

impeachable scaffolding of first principles is laid 
down, the arguments seem to mass together like 
thunder-clouds, the air quivers with expectation, 
and we are sure that on turning the page the sacred 
rain will descend on our patient and thirsty souls, 
when lo ! a new chapter begins with a new statement 
of the first principles, adorned with fresh illustra- 
tions : we forget the event we felt ourselves led up 
to, the sky empties itself again, and we return to 
our original drought. Not that the first principles 
of Mr. Lewes are not admirable. They surely are. 
But the mind can no more feed on pure first prin- 
ciples than the body can live on pure nitrogen and 
carbon. Only the axiomata media are fertile, and 
lead to particular discoveries. It is a bad sign when 
a thinker keeps falling back on abstractions so true 
that all must applaud them, but so broad that they 
form quite as good a shelter for one doctrine as for 
another. What boots it when we are really curious 
to find some one elementary factor or law of living 
matter to be told that "Lif e is the connexus of func- 
tions"? Or if a psychologist is really puzzling his 
brain about very special and particular difficulties, 
how can it profit him to be elaborately reminded by 
Mr. Lewes that confusion of terms is a great source 
of error, that we should everywhere keep account 
of special differences no less than fundamental 
identities, that property must never be confounded 
with function, that sensibility makes life a phe- 
nomenon of a higher order than mechanism, and 
the like? Not, indeed, since reading Daniel De- 

41 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1877 ^ 

ronda have we been so annoyed by a writer's redun- 
dancy, have we found ourselves so persistently 
seized by the button and moralized to when we were 
most impatient for the story to move along and for 
the author to effect something with his materials. 



42 



VIII 

KEMABKS ON SPENCEK'S DEFINITION 
OF MIND AS COKKESPONDENCE * 

[1878] 

As a rule it may be said that, at a time when 
readers are so overwhelmed with work as they are 
at the present day, all purely critical and destruc- 
tive writing ought to be reprobated. The half -gods 
generally refuse to go, in spite of the ablest criti- 
cism, until the gods actually have arrived ; but then, 
too, criticism is hardly needed. But there are cases 
in which every rule may be broken. "What!" ex- 
claimed Voltaire, when accused of offering no sub- 
stitute for the Christianity he attacked, "je vous 
delivre d'une bete feroce, et vous me demandez par 
quoi je la remplace!" Without comparing Mr. 
Spencer's definition of Mind either to Christianity 
or to a "bete feroce" it may certainly be said to be 
very far-reaching in its consequences, and, accord- 

[* Reprinted from Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1878, 12, 
1-18. The central idea of this essay is the teleological char- 
acter of mind. This idea may be said to be the germinal idea 
of James's psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. 
Cf. Will to Believe, p. 117 ("Reflex Action and Theism"), where 
this essay is referred to, with the remark that "the conceiving 
or theorizing faculty . . . functions exclusively for the sake of 
ends that . . . are set by our emotional and practical subjec- 
tivity." Ed.] 

43 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1878 J 

ing to certain standards, noxious; whilst probably 
a large proportion of those hard-headed readers who 
subscribe to the Popular Science Monthly and 
Nature, and whose sole philosopher Mr. Spencer is, 
are fascinated by it without being in the least aware 
what its consequences are. 

The defects of the formula are so glaring that I 
am surprised it should not long ago have been 
critically overhauled. The reader will readily 
recollect what it is. In part III of his Principles 
of Psychology, 1 Mr. Spencer, starting from the sup- 
position that the most essential truth concerning 
mental evolution will be that which allies it to the 
evolution nearest akin to it, namely, that of Life, 
finds that the formula "adjustment of inner to 
outer relations/' which was the definition of life, 
comprehends also "the entire process of mental 
evolution." In a series of chapters of J great appar- 
ent thoroughness and minuteness he shows how all 
the different grades of mental perfection are ex- 
pressed by the degree of extension of this adjust- 
ment, or, as he here calls it, "correspondence," in 
space, time, specialty, generality, and integration. 
The polyp's tentacles contract only to immediately 
present stimuli, and to almost all alike. The mam- 
mal will store up food for a day, or even for a sea- 
son ; the bird will start on its migration for a goal 
hundreds of miles away; the savage will sharpen 
his arrows to hunt next year's game; while the as- 
tronomer will proceed, equipped with all his instru- 
L 1 Published in 1855. Ed.] 

44 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

ments, to a point thousands of miles distant, there 
to watch, at a fixed day, hour, and minute, a transit 
of Venus or an eclipse of the Sun. 

The picture drawn is so vast and simple, it in- 
cludes such a multitude of details in its monotonous 
frame-work, that it is no wonder that readers of a 
passive turn of mind are, usually, more impressed 
by it than by any portion of the book. But on the 
slightest scrutiny its solidity begins to disappear. 
In the first place, one asks, what right has one, in a 
formula embracing professedly the "entire process 
of mental evolution," to mention only phenomena of 
cognition, and to omit all sentiments, all aesthetic 
impulses, all religious emotions and personal affec- 
tions? The ascertainment of outward fact consti- 
tutes only one species of mental activity. The genus 
contains, in addition to purely cognitive judg- 
ments, or judgments of the actual — judgments that 
things do, as a matter of fact, exist so or so — an 
immense number of emotional judgments : judg- 
ments of the ideal, judgments that things should 
exist thus and not so. How much of our mental 
life is occupied with this matter of a better or a 
worse? How much of it involves preferences or 
repugnances on our part? We cannot laugh at a 
joke, we cannot go to one theatre rather than an- 
other, take more trouble for the sake of our own 
child than our neighbor's ; we cannot long for vaca- 
tion, show our best manners to a foreigner, or pay 
our pew rent, without involving in the premises of 
our action some element which has nothing what- 

45 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS C 1878 3 

ever to do with simply cognizing the actual, but 
which, out of alternative possible actuals, selects 
one and cognizes that as the ideal. In a word, 
"Mind," as we actually find it, contains all sorts 
of laws — those of logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, 
decorum, beauty, morals, and so forth, as well as 
of perception of fact. Common sense estimates 
mental excellence by a combination of all these 
standards, and yet how few of them correspond to 
anything that actually is — they are laws of the 
Ideal, dictated by subjective interests pure and 
simple. Thus the greater part of Mind, quantita- 
tively considered, refuses to have anything to do 
with Mr. Spencer's definition. It is quite true that 
these ideal judgments are treated by him with great 
ingenuity and felicity at the close of his work — 
indeed, his treatment of them there seems to me to 
be its most admirable portion. But they are there 
handled as separate items having no connection 
with that extension of the "correspondence" which 
is maintained elsewhere to be the all-sufficing law 
of mental growth. 

Most readers would dislike to admit without co- 
ercion that a law was adequate which obliged them 
to erase from literature (if by literature were 
meant anything worthy of the title of "mental 
product") all works except treatises on natural 
science, history, and statistics. Let us examine the 
reason that Mr. Spencer appears to consider co- 
ercive. 

It is this : That, since every process grows more 

46 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

and more complicated as it develops, more swarmed 
over by incidental and derivative conditions which 
disguise and adulterate its original simplicity, the 
only way to discover its true and essential form is 
to trace it back to its earliest beginning. There it 
will appear in its genuine character pure and Tin- 
defiled. Religious, aesthetic, and ethical judgments, 
having grown up in the course of evolution, by 
means that we can very plausibly divine, of course 
may be stripped off from the main stem of intelli- 
gence and leave that undisturbed. With a similar 
intent Mr. Tylor says : " Whatever throws light on 
the origin of a conception throws light on its 
validity." Thus, then, there is no resource but to 
appeal to the polyp, or whatever shows us the form 
of evolution just before intelligence, and what that, 
and only what that, contains will be the root and 
heart of the matter. 

But no sooner is the reason for the law thus enun- 
ciated than many objections occur to the reader. In 
the first place, the general principle seems to lead 
to absurd conclusions. If the embryologic line of 
appeal can alone teach us the genuine essences of 
things, if the polyp is to dictate our law of mind to 
us because he came first, where are we to stop? He 
must himself be treated in the same way. Back of 
him lay the not-yet-polyp, and, back of all, the uni- 
versal mother, fire-mist. To seek there for the 
reality, of course would reduce all thinking to 
nonentity, and, although Mr. Spencer would prob- 
ably not regard this conclusion as a redaictio ad 

47 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 1878 1 

absurdum of his principle, since it would only be 
another path to his theory of the Unknowable, less 
systematic thinkers may hesitate. But, waiving for 
the moment the question of principle, let us admit 
that relatively to our thought, at any rate, the 
polyp's thought is pure and undefiled. Does the 
study of the polyp lead us distinctly to Mr. Spen- 
cer's formula of correspondence? To begin with, if 
that formula be meant to include disinterested 
scientific curiosity, or "correspondence" in the 
sense of cognition, with no ulterior selfish end, the 
polyp gives it no countenance whatever. He is as 
innocent of scientific as of moral and aesthetic en- 
thusiasm; he is the most narrowly teleological of 
organisms ; reacting, so far as he reacts at all, only 
for self-preservation. 

This leads us to ask what Mr. Spencer exactly 
means by the word correspondence. Without ex- 
planation, the word is wholly indeterminate. Ev- 
erything corresponds in some way with everything 
else that co-exists in the same world with it. But, 
as the formula of correspondence was originally 
derived from biology, we shall possibly find in our 
author's treatise on that science an exact definition 
of what he means by it. On seeking there, we find 
nowhere a definition, but numbers of synonyms. 
The inner relations are "adjusted," "conformed," 
"fitted," "related," to the outer. They must "meet" 
or "balance" them. There must be "concord" or 
"harmony" between them. Or, again, the organism 
must "counteract" the changes in the environment. 

48 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

But these words, too, are wholly indeterminate. 
The fox is most beautifully "adjusted" to the 
hounds and huntsmen who pursue him; the lime- 
stone "meets" molecule by molecule the acid which 
corrodes it ; the man is exquisitely "conformed" to 
the trichina which invades him, or to the typhus 
poison which consumes him; and the forests "har- 
monize" incomparably with the fires that lay them 
low. Clearly, a further specification is required; 
and, although Mr. Spencer shrinks strangely from 
enunciating this specification, he everywhere works 
his formula so as to imply it in the clearest manner. 

Influence on physical well-being or survival is 
his implied criterion of the rank of mental action. 
The moth which flies into the candle, instead of 
away from it, "fails," in Spencer's words (vol. I, 
p. 409 ) , to "correspond" with its environment ; but 
clearly, in this sense, pure cognitive inference of the 
existence of heat after a perception of light would 
not suffice to constitute correspondence; while a 
moth which, on feeling the light, should merely 
vaguely fear to approach it, but have no proper 
image of the heat, would "correspond." So that the 
Spencerian formula, to mean anything definite at 
all, must, at least, be re-written as follows : "Right 
or intelligent mental action consists in the estab- 
lishment, corresponding to outward relations, of 
such inward relations and reactions as will favor 
the survival of the thinker, or, at least, his physical 
well-being." 

Such a definition as this is precise, but at the 

49 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1878 l 

same time it is frankly teleological. It explicitly 
postulates a distinction between mental action pure 
and simple, and right mental action; and further- 
more, it proposes, as criteria of this latter, certain 
ideal ends — those of physical prosperity or sur- 
vival, which are pure subjective interests on the ani- 
mal's part, brought with it upon the scene and cor- 
responding to no relation already there. 1 No men- 
tal action is right or intelligent which fails to fit 
this standard. No correspondence can pass muster 
till it shows its subservience to these ends. Corre-' 
sponding itself to no actual outward thing; refer- 
ring merely to a future which may be, but which 
these interests now say shall be ; purely ideal, in a 
word, they judge, dominate, determine all corre- 

1 These interests are the real a priori element in cognition. 
By saying that their pleasures and pains have nothing to do 
with correspondence, I mean simply this : To a large number 
of terms in the environment there may be inward correlatives 
of a neutral sort as regards feeling. The "correspondence" is 
already there. But, now, suppose some to be accented with 
pleasure, others with pain ; that is a fact additional to the cor- 
respondence, a fact with no outward correlative. But it im- 
mediately orders the correspondences in this way : that the 
pleasant or interesting items are singled out, dwelt upon, de- 
veloped into their farther connections, whilst the unpleasant or 
insipid ones are ignored or suppressed. The future of the 
Mind's development is thus mapped out in advance by the way 
in which the lines of pleasure and pain run. The interests pre- 
cede the outer relations noticed. Take the utter absence of 
response of a dog or a savage to the greater mass of environing 
relations. How can you alter it unless you previously awaken 
an interest — i.e., produce a susceptibility to intellectual pleas- 
ure in certain modes of cognitive exercise? Interests, then, 
are an all-essential factor which no writer pretending to give 
an account of mental evolution has a right to neglect. 

50 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

spondences between the inner and the outer. Which 
is as much as to say that mere correspondence with 
the outer world is a notion on which it is wholly 
impossible to base a definition of mental action. 
Mr. Spencer's occult reason for leaving unexpressed 
the most important part of the definition he works 
with probably lies in its apparent implication of 
subjective spontaneity. The mind, according to his 
philosophy, should be pure product, absolute deri- 
vative from the non-mental. To make it dictate 
conditions, bring independent interests into the 
game which may determine what we shall call cor- 
respondence, and what not, might, at first sight, 
appear contrary to the notion of evolution which 
forbids the introduction at any point of an abso- 
lutely new factor. In what sense the existence of 
survival interest does postulate such a factor we 
shall hereafter see. I think myself that it is pos- 
sible to express all its outward results in non- 
mental terms. But the unedifying look of the thing, 
its simulation of an independent mental teleology, 
seems to have frightened Mr. Spencer here, as else- 
where, away from a serious scrutiny of the facts. 
But let us be indulgent to his timidity, and assume 
that survival was all the while a "mental reserva- 
tion" with him, only excluded from his formula by 
reason of the comforting sound it might have to 
Philistine ears. 

We should then have, as the embodiment of the 
highest ideal perfection of mental development, a 
creature of superb cognitive endowments, from 

51 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1878 l 

whose piercing perceptions no fact was too minute 
or too remote to escape; whose all-embracing fore- 
sight no contingency could find unprepared ; whose 
invincible flexibility of resource no array of out- 
ward onslaught could overpower; but in whom all 
these gifts were swayed by the single passion of love 
of life, of survival at any price. This determination 
filling his whole energetic being, consciously real- 
ized, intensified by meditation, becomes a fixed idea, 
would use all the other faculties as its means, and, 
if they ever flagged, would by its imperious intensity 
spur them and hound them on to ever fresh exer- 
tions and achievements. There can be no doubt 
that, if such an incarnation of earthly prudence 
existed, a race of beings in whom this monotonously 
narrow passion for self-preservation were aided by 
every cognitive gift, they would soon be kings of 
all the earth. All known human races would wither 
before their breath, and be as dust beneath their 
conquering feet. 

But whether any Spencerian would hail with 
hearty joy their advent is another matter. Cer- 
tainly Mr. Spencer would not; while the common 
sense of mankind would stand aghast at the 
thought of them. Why does common opinion abhor 
such a being? Why does it crave greater "rich- 
ness" of nature in its mental ideal? Simply be- 
cause, to common sense, survival is only one out of 
many interests — primus inter pares, perhaps, but 
still in the midst of peers. What are these inter- 
ests? Most men would reply that they are all that 

52 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

makes survival worth securing. The social affec- 
tions, all the various forms of play, the thrilling in- 
timations of art, the delights of philosophic con- 
templation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of 
moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of 
wit — some or all of these are absolutely required to 
make the notion of mere existence tolerable; and 
individuals who, by their special powers, satisfy 
these desires are protected by their fellows and en- 
abled to survive, though their mental constitution 
should in other respects be lamentably ill-"ad- 
justed" to the outward world. The story-teller, the 
musician, the theologian, the actor, or even the mere 
charming fellow, have never lacked means of sup- 
port, however helpless they might individually have 
been to conform with those outward relations which 
we know as the powers of nature. The reason is 
very plain. To the individual man, as a social be- 
ing, the interests of his fellow are a part of his en- 
vironment. If his powers correspond to the wants 
of this social environment, he may survive, even 
though he be ill-adapted to the natural or "outer" 
environment. But these wants are pure subjective 
ideals, with nothing outward to correspond to 
them. So that, as far as the individual is concerned, 
it becomes necessary to modify Spencer's survival 
formula still further, by introducing into the term 
environment a reference, not only to existent 
things 1 , but also to ideal wants. It would have 

[* The word "non-existent" has been omitted as being due, 
apparently, to a misprint. Ed.] 

53 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1878 l 

to run in some such way as this : "Excellence of the 
individual mind consists in the establishment of 
inner relations more and more extensively con- 
formed to the outward facts of nature, and to the 
ideal wants of the individual's fellows, but all of 
such a character as will promote survival or physi- 
cal prosperity." 

But here, again, common sense will meet us with 
an objection. Mankind desiderate certain qualities 
in the individual which are incompatible with his 
chance of survival being a maximum. Why do we 
all so eulogize and love the heroic, recklessly gen- 
erous, and disinterested type of character? These 
qualities certainly imperil the survival of their pos- 
sessor. The reason is very plain. Even if headlong 
courage, pride, and martyr-spirit do ruin the in- 
dividual, they benefit the community as a whole 
whenever they are displayed by one of its members 
against a competing tribe. "It is death to you, but 
fun for us." Our interest in having the hero as he 
is, plays indirectly into the 'hands of our survival, 
though not of his. 

This explicit acknowledgment of the survival in- 
terests of the tribe, as accounting for many inter- 
ests in the individual which seem at first sight 
either unrelated to survival or at war with it, seems, 
after all, to bring back unity and simplicity into the 
Spencerian formula. Why, the Spencerian may 
ask, may not all the luxuriant foliage of ideal inter- 
ests — aesthetic, philosophic, theologic, and the rest — 
which co-exist along with that of survival, be pres- 

54 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

ent in the tribe and so form part of the individual's 
environment, merely by virtue of the fact that they 
minister in an indirect way to the survival of the 
tribe as a whole? The disinterested scientific ap- 
petite of cognition, the sacred philosophic love of 
consistency, the craving for luxury and beauty, the 
passion for amusement, may all find their proper 
significance as processes of mind, strictly so-called, 
in the incidental utilitarian discoveries which flow 
from the energy they set in motion. Conscience, 
thoroughness, purity, love of truth, susceptibility 
to discipline, eager delight in fresh impressions, al- 
though none of them are traits of Intelligence in se, 
may thus be marks of a general mental energy, 
without which victory over nature and over other 
human competitors would be impossible. And, as 
victory means survival, and survival is the criterion 
of Intelligent "Correspondence," these qualities, 
though not expressed in the fundamental law of 
mind, may yet have been all the while understood 
by Mr. Spencer to form so many secondary conse- 
quences and corollaries of that law. 

But here it is decidedly time to take our stand 
and refuse our aid in propping up Mr. Spencer's 
definition by any further good-natured transla- 
tions and supplementary contributions of our own. 
It is palpable at a glance that a mind whose sur- 
vival interest could only be adequately secured by 
such a wasteful array of energy squandered on side 
issues would be immeasurably inferior to one like 
that which we supposed a few pages back, in which 

55 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS [1878] 

the monomania of tribal preservation should be the 
one all-devouring passion. 

Surely there is nothing in the essence of intelli- 
gence which should oblige it forever to delude itself 
as to its own ends, and to strive towards a goal suc- 
cessfully only at the cost of consciously appearing 
to have far other aspirations in view. 

A furnace which should produce along with its 
metal fifty different varieties of ash and slag, a 
planing-mill whose daily yield in shavings far ex- 
ceeded that in boards, would rightly be pronounced 
inferior to one of the usual sort, even though more 
energy should be displayed in its working, and at 
moments some of that energy be directly effective. 
If ministry to survival be the sole criterion of men- 
tal excellence, then luxury and amusement, Shake- 
speare, Beethoven, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, stel- 
lar spectroscopy, diatom markings, and nebular 
hypotheses are by-products on too wasteful a scale. 
The slag-heap is too big — it abstracts more energy 
than it contributes to the ends of the machine ; and 
every serious evolutionist ought resolutely to bend 
his attention henceforward to the reduction in num- 
ber and amount of these outlying interests, and the 
diversion of the energy they absorb into purely pru- 
dential channels. 

Here, then, is our dilemma: One man may say 
that the law of mental development is dominated 
solely by the principle of conservation; another, 
that richness is the criterion of mental evolution; 
a third, that pure cognition of the actual is the es- 

56 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

sence of worthy thinking — but who shall pretend 
to decide which is right? The umpire would have 
to bring a standard of his own upon the scene, 
which would be just as subjective and personal as 
the standards used by the contestants. And yet 
some standard there must be, if we are to attempt 
to define in any way the worth of different mental 
manifestations. 

Is it not already clear to the reader's mind that 
the whole difficulty in making Mr. Spencer's law 
work lies in the fact that it is not really a constitu- 
tive, but a regulative, law of thought which he is 
erecting, and that he does not frankly say so? Every 
law of Mind must be either a law of the cogitatum 
or a law of the cogitandum. If it be a law in the 
sense of an analysis of what we do think, then it 
will include error, nonsense, the worthless as well 
as the worthy, metaphysics, and mythologies as well 
as scientific truths which mirror the actual en- 
vironment. But such a law of the cogitatum is 
already well known. It is no other than the asso- 
ciation of ideas according to their several modes; 
or, rather, it is this association definitively per- 
fected by the inclusion of the teleological factor of 
interest by Mr. Hodgson in the fifth chapter of his 
masterly "Time and Space." 

That Mr. Spencer, in the part of his work which 
we are considering, has no such law as this in view 
is evident from the fact that he has striven to give 
an original formulation to such a law in another 
part of his book, in that chapter, namely, on the 

57 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS IW 

assoeiability of relations, in the first volume, where 
the apperception of times and places, and the sup- 
pression of association by similarity, are made to 
explain the facts in a way whose operose ineptitude 
has puzzled many a simple reader. 

Now, every living man would instantly define 
right thinking as thinking in correspondence with 
reality. But Spencer, in saying that right thought 
is that which conforms to existent outward rela- 
tions, and this exclusively, undertakes to decide 
what the reality is. In other words, under cover of 
an apparently formal definition he really smuggles 
in a material definition of the most far-reaching im- 
port. For the Stoic, to whom vivere convenienter 
naturw was also the law of mind, the reality was an 
archetypal Nature ; for the Christian, whose mental 
law is to discover the will of God, and make one's 
actions correspond thereto, that is the reality. In 
fact, the philosophic problem which all the ages 
have been trying to solve in order to make thought 
in some way correspond with it, and which dis- 
believers in philosophy call insoluble, is just that: 
What is the reality? All the thinking, all the con- 
flict of ideals, going on in the world at the present 
moment is in some way tributary to this quest. To 
attempt, therefore, with Mr. Spencer, to decide the 
matter merely incidentally, to forestall discussion 
by a definition — to carry the position by surprise, 
in a word — is a proceeding savoring more of piracy 
than philosophy. No, Spencer's definition of what 
we ought to think cannot be suffered to lurk in am- 

58 



[1878] SPENCEK'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

bush ; it must stand out explicitly with the rest, and 
expect to be challenged and give an account of 
itself like any other ideal norm of thought. 

We have seen how he seems to vacillate in his de- 
termination of it. At one time, "scientific" thought, 
mere passive mirroring of outward nature, purely 
registrative cognition; at another time, thought in 
the exclusive service of survival, would seem to be 
his ideal. Let us consider the latter ideal first, since 
it has the polyp's authority in its favor : "We must 
survive — that end must regulate all our thought." 
The poor man who said to Talleyrand, "II faut ~bien 
que je vive!" expressed it very well. But criticise 
this ideal, or transcend it as Talleyrand did by his 
cool reply, u Je n'en vois pas la necessite" and it can 
say nothing more for itself. A priori it is a mere 
brute teleological affirmation on a par with all 
others. Vainly you should hope to prove it to a 
person bent on suicide, who has but the one long- 
ing — to escape, to cease. Vainly you would argue 
with a Buddhist or a German pessimist, for they 
feel the full imperious strength of the desire, but 
have an equally profound persuasion of its essential 
wrongness and mendacity. Vainly, too, would you 
talk to a Christian, or even to any believer in the 
simple creed that the deepest meaning of the world 
is moral. For they hold that mere conformity with 
the outward — worldly success and survival — is not 
the absolute and exclusive end. In the failures to 
"adjust" — in the rubbish-heap, according to Spen- 
cer — lies, for them, the real key to the truth — the 

59 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1878] 

sole mission of life being to teach that the outward 
actual is not the whole of being. 

And now — if, falling back on the scientific ideal, 
you say that to know is the one tiXoq of intelli- 
gence — not only will the inimitable Turkish cadi in 
Layard's Nineveh praise God in your face that he 
seeks not that which he requires not, and ask, "Will 
much knowledge create thee a double belly?" — not 
only may I, if it please me, legitimately refuse to 
stir from my fool's paradise of theosophy and mys- 
ticism, in spite of all your calling (since, after all, 
your true knowledge and my pious feeling have 
alike nothing to back them save their seeming good 
to our respective personalities) — not only this, but 
to the average sense of mankind, whose ideal of 
mental nature is best expressed by the word "rich- 
ness," your statistical and cognitive intelligence 
will seem insufferably narrow, dry, tedious, and 
unacceptable. 

The truth appears to be that every individual man 
may, if it please him, set up his private categori- 
cal imperative of what Tightness or excellence in 
thought shall consist in, and these different ideals, 
instead of entering upon the scene armed with a 
warrant — whether derived from the polyp or from 
a transcendental source — appear only as so many 
brute affirmations left to fight it out upon the chess- 
board among themselves. They are, at best, postu- 
lates, each of which must depend on the general 
consensus of experience as a whole to bear out its 
validity. The formula which proves to have the 

GO 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

most massive destiny will be the true one. But this 
is a point which can only be solved airibulando, and 
not by any a priori definition. The attempt to fore- 
stall the decision is free to all to make, but all make 
it at their risk. Our respective hypotheses and post- 
ulates help to shape the course of thought, but the 
only thing which we all agree in assuming is, that 
thought will be coerced away from them if they are 
wrong. If Spencer to-day says, "Bow to the ac- 
tual," whilst Swinburne spurns "compromise with 
the nature of things," I exclaim, "Fiat justitia, 
pereat mundus" and Mill says, "To hell I will go, 
rather than 'adjust' myself to an evil God," what 
umpire can there be between us but the future? The 
idealists and the empiricists confront each other 
like Guelphs and Ghibellines, but each alike waits 
for adoption, as it were, by the course of events. 

In other words, we are all fated to be a priori 
teleologists whether we will or not. Interests 
which we bring with us, and simply posit or take 
our stand upon, are the very flour out of which our 
mental dough is kneaded. The organism of thought, 
from the vague dawn of discomfort or ease in the 
polyp to the intellectual joy of Laplace among his 
formulas, is teleological through and through. Not 
a cognition occurs but feeling is there to comment 
on it, to stamp it as of greater or less worth. 
Spencer and Plato are ejusdem farince. To attempt 
to hoodwink teleology out of sight by saying noth- 
ing about it, is the vainest of procedures. Spencer 
merely takes sides with the tIXo? he happens to 

61 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS C 1878 3 

prefer, whether it be that of physical well-being or 
that of cognitive registration. He represents a par- 
ticular teleology. Well might teleology (had she 
a voice) exclaim with Emerson's Brahma: 

"If the red slayer think he slays, 
Or if the slain think he is slain, 
They know not well the subtle ways 
I keep, and pass and turn again. 



"They reckon ill who leave me out ; 
When me they fly, I am the wings ; 
I am the doubter and the doubt," etc. 

But now a scientific man, feeling something un- 
canny in this omnipresence of a teleological factor 
dictating how the mind shall correspond — an in- 
terest seemingly tributary to nothing non-mental 
— may ask us what we meant by saying sometime 
back that in one sense it is perfectly possible to 
express the existence of interests in non-mental 
terms. We meant simply this : That the reactions 
or outward consequences of the interests could be 
so expressed. The interest of survival which has 
hitherto been treated as an ideal should-be, presid- 
ing from the start and marking out the way in 
which an animal must react, is, from an outward 
and physical point of view, nothing more than an 
objective future implication of the reaction (if it 
occurs) as an actual fact. If the animal's brain 
acts fortuitously in the right way, he survives. His 
young do the same. The reference to survival in 
no way preceded or conditioned the intelligent act; 

62 



[1878] SPENCEK'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

but the fact of survival was merely bound up with 
it as an incidental consequence, and may, therefore, 
be called accidental, rather than instrumental, to 
the production of intelligence. It is the same with 
all other interests. They are pleasures and pains 
incidentally implied in the workings of the nervous 
mechanism, and, therefore, in their ultimate origin, 
non-mental; for the idiosyncrasies of our nervous 
centres are mere "spontaneous variations," like any 
of those which form the ultimate data for Darwin's 
theory. A brain which functions so as to insure 
survival may, therefore, be called intelligent in no 
other sense than a tooth, a limb, or a stomach, 
which should serve the same end — the sense, 
namely, of appropriate ; as when we say "that is an 
intelligent device,' 7 meaning a device fitted to secure 
a certain end which we assume. If nirvana were 
the end, instead of survival, then it is true the 
means would be different, but in both cases alike 
the end would not precede the means, or even be 
coeval with them, but depend utterly upon them, 
and follow them in point of time. The fox's cunning 
and the hare's speed are thus alike creations of the 
non-mental. The xeXos they entail is no more an 
agent in one case than another, since in both alike 
it is a resultant. Spencer, then, seems justified in 
not admitting it to appear as an irreducible ulti- 
mate factor of Mind, any more than of Body. 

This position is perfectly unassailable so long as 
one describes the phenomena in this manner from 
without. The tsXo<; in that case can only be hypo- 

63 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1878 ^ 

thetically, not imperatively, stated: if such and 
such be the end, then such brain functions are the 
most intelligent, just as such and such digestive 
functions are the most appropriate. But such and 
such cannot be declared as the end, except by the 
commenting mind of an outside spectator. The 
organs themselves, in their working at any instant, 
cannot but be supposed indifferent as to what prod- 
uct they are destined fatally to bring forth, cannot 
be imagined whilst fatally producing one result to 
have at the same time a notion of a different result 
which should be their truer end, but which they are 
unable to secure. 

Nothing can more strikingly show, it seems to me, 
the essential difference between the point of view 
of consciousness and that of outward existence. We 
can describe the latter only in teleological terms, 
hypothetically, or else by the addition of a sup- 
posed contemplating mind which measures what it 
sees going on by its private teleological standard, 
and judges it intelligent. But consciousness itself 
is not merely intelligent in this sense. It is intelli- 
gent intelligence. It seems both to supply the 
means and the standard by which they are meas- 
ured. It not only serves a final purpose, but brings 
a final purpose — posits, declares it. This purpose 
is not a mere hypothesis — "if survival is to occur, 
then brain must so perform," etc. — but an impera- 
tive decree: "Survival shall occur, and, therefore, 
brain must so perform!" It seems hopelessly im- 
possible to formulate anything of this sort in non- 
64 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

mental terms, and this is why I must still contend 
that the phenomena of subjective "interest," as soon 
as the animal consciously realizes the latter, ap- 
pears upon the scene as an absolutely new factor, 
which we can only suppose to be latent thitherto 
in the physical environment by crediting the physi- 
cal atoms, etc., each with a consciousness of its own, 
approving or condemning its motions. 

This, then, must be our conclusion : That no law 
of the cogitandum, no normative receipt for excel- 
lence in thinking, can be authoritatively promul- 
gated. The only formal canon that we can apply 
to mind which is unassailable is the barren truism 
that it must think rightly. We can express this in 
terms of correspondence by saying that thought 
must correspond with truth ; but whether that truth 
be actual or ideal is left undecided. 

We have seen that the invocation of the polyp 
to decide for us that it is actual (apart from the 
fact that he does not decide in that way) is based 
on a principle which refutes itself if consistently 
carried out. Spencer's formula has crumbled into 
utter worthlessness in our hands, and we have noth- 
ing to replace it by except our several individual 
hypotheses, convictions, and beliefs. Far from 
being vouched for by the past, these are verified 
only by the future. They are all of them, in some 
sense, laws of the ideal. They have to keep house 
together, and the weakest goes to the wall. The 
survivors constitute the right way of thinking. 
While the issue is still undecided, we can only call 

65 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1878 l 

them our prepossessions. But, decided or not, 
"go in" we each must for one set of interests or an- 
other. The question for each of us in the battle of 
life is, "Can we come out with it?" Some of these 
interests admit to-day of little dispute. Survival, 
physical well-being, and undistorted cognition of 
what is, will hold their ground. But it is truly 
strange to see writers like Messrs. Huxley and 
Clifford, who show themselves able to call most 
things in question, unable, when it comes to the 
interest of cognition, to touch it with their solvent 
doubt. They assume some mysterious imperative 
laid upon the mind, declaring that the infinite ascer- 
tainment of facts is its supreme duty, which he 
who evades is a blasphemer and child of shame. 
And yet these authors can hardly have failed to 
reflect, at some moment or other, that the disin- 
terested love of information, and still more the love 
of consistency in thought (that true scientific 
wstrus), and the ideal fealty to Truth (with a 
capital T), are all so many particular forms of 
aesthetic interest, late in their evolution, arising 
in conjunction with a vast number of similar aes- 
thetic interests, and bearing with them no a priori 
mark of being worthier than these. If we may 
doubt one, we may doubt all. How shall I say that 
knowing fact with Messrs. Huxley and Clifford is 
a better use to put my mind to than feeling good 
with Messrs. Moody and Sankey, unless by slowly 
and painfully finding out that in the long run it 
works best? 

66 



[1878] SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF MIND 

I, for my part, cannot escape the consideration, 
forced upon me at every turn, that the knower is 
not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold any- 
where, and passively reflecting an order that he 
comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower 
is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth on one side, 
whilst on the other he registers the truth which he 
helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, 
postulates, so far as they are bases for human 
action — action which to a great extent transforms 
the world — help to make the truth which they de- 
clare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from 
its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the 
game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments 
of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off 
from the body of the cogitandum as if they were ex- 
crescences, or meant, at most, survival. We know 
so little about the ultimate nature of things, or of 
ourselves, that it would be sheer folly dogmatically 
to say that an ideal rational order may not be real. 
The only objective criterion of reality is coercive- 
ness, in the long run, over thought. Objective facts, 
Spencer's outward relations, are real only because 
they coerce sensation. Any interest which should 
be coercive on the same massive scale would be 
eodem jure real. By its very essence, the reality of 
a thought is proportionate to the way it grasps us. 
Its intensity, its seriousness — its interest, in a word 
— taking these qualities, not at any given instant, 
but as shown by the total upshot of experience. If 
judgments of the should-be are fated to grasp us in 

67 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS L 1878 ^ 

this way, they are what "correspond." The ancients 
placed the conception of Fate at the bottom of 
things — deeper than the gods themselves. "The 
fate of thought/' utterly barren and indeterminate 
as such a formula is, is the only unimpeachable reg- 
ulative Law of Mind. 



68 



IX 

QUELQUES CONSIDEKATIONS SUE LA 
METHODE SUBJECTIVE 1 

[1878] 
Aux Redacteurs de la Critique philosophique 

Messieurs, 

Depuis longtemps deja, quand des idees noires, 
pessimisme, fatalisme, etc., me viennent obseder, 
j'ai l'habitude de m'en debarrasser par un raison- 
nement fort simple, et tellement d'accord ayec les 
principes de la philosophic a laquelle votre revue 
est consacree, que je m'etonne presque de ne l'avoir 
pas eucore rencontre totidem verbis dans quelqu'un 
de vos cahiers hebdomadaires. J'ose vous le sou- 
mettre. 

II s'agit de savoir si Von est en droit de repousser 
une theorie confirmee en apparence par un nombre 
tres-considerable de faits objectifs, uniquement 
parce qu'elle ne repond point a nos preferences in- 
terieures. 

I 1 Reprinted from Critique Philosophique, 1878, 6me annee, 
2, 407-413. The present article is a brief preliminary state- 
ment of matters afterwards discussed in "Rationality, Activity 
and Faith," first published in the Princeton Review in 1882, 
and later reprinted in the Will to Believe. Cf. below, p. 83, 
note. The early date of the composition of this communication, 
and its flattering reception by Renouvier, show that James's 
interests and fame were from the beginning of his career identi- 
fied with that philosophical tendency which culminated in his 
Pragmatism. See above, p. 43, note. Ed.] 

69 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS f 1878 J 

On n'a pas ce droit, nous disent les hommes qui 
cultivent aujourd'hui les sciences, ou du moins 
presque tous, et tous les positivistes. Repousser 
une conclusion par ce seul motif qu'elle contrarie 
nos sentiments intimes et nos desirs, c'est faire 
emploi de la methode subjective; et la methode 
subjective, a les en croire, est le peche originel de la 
science, la racine de toutes les erreurs scientifiques. 
Suivant eux, loin d'aller ou le portent ses attraits, 
l'homme qui cherche la verite doit se reduire a la 
simple condition d'instrument enregistreur, faire de 
sa conscience de savant une sorte de feuille blanche 
et de surface morte, sur laquelle la realite exterieure 
viendrait se retracer sans alteration ni courbure. 

Je nie absolument la legitimite d'un tel parti pris 
chez ceux qui pretendent le poser en regie univer- 
sale de la methode. Cette regie est bonne a appli- 
quer a un ordre de recherches, mais elle est denuee 
de valeur, elle est meme absurde, dans un autre 
ordre de verites a trouver. Rejeter rigoureusement 
la methode subjective partout ou la verite existe en 
dehors de mon action et se determine avec certitude 
independamment de tout ce que je peux desirer ou 
craindre, rien de plus sage. Ainsi, les faits acquis 
de l'histoire, les mouvements futurs des astres sont 
des maintenant determines, soit qu'ils me plaisent 
ou non comme ils sont ou seront. Mes preferences 
ici sont impuissantes a produire ou a modifier les 
choses et ne pourraient qu'obscurcir mon jugement. 
Je dois resolument leur imposer silence. 

Mais il est une classe de faits dont la matiere n'est 

70 



[1878] QUELQUES CONSIDEBATIONS 

point ainsi constitute ou fixee d'avance, — des faits 
qui ne sont pas donnes. — Je fais une ascension 
alpestre. Je me trouve dans un mauvais pas dont 
je ne peux sortir que par un saut hardi et dange- 
reux, et ce saut, je voudrais le pouvoir faire, niais 
j 'ignore, faute d'experience, si j'en aurai la force. 
Supposons que j'emploie la methode subjective: je 
crois ce que je desire; ma confiance me donne des 
forces et rend possible ce qui, sans elle, ne l'eut 
peut-etre pas ete. Je franchis done l'espace et me 
voila hors de danger. Mais supposons que je sois 
dispose a nier ma capacite, par ce motif qu'elle ne 
m'a pas encore ete demontree par ce genre d'ex- 
ploits : alors je balance, j'hesite, et tant et tant qu'a 
la fin, affaibli et tremblant, reduit a prendre un 
elan de pur desespoir, je manque mon coup et je 
tombe dans l'abime. En pareil cas, quoi qu'il en 
puisse advenir, je ne serai qu'un sot si je ne crois 
pas ce que je desire, car ma croyance se trouve etre 
une condition preliminaire, indispensable de l'ac- 
complissement de son objet qu'elle anirme. Croyant 
a mes forces, je m'elance; le resultat donne raison 
a ma croyance, la verifie; e'est alors seulement 
qu'elle devient vraie, mais alors on peut dire aussi 
qu'elle etait vraie. II y a done des cas ou une croy- 
ance cree sa propre verification. Ne croyez pas, 
vous aurez raison; et, en effet, vous tomberez dans 
l'abime. Croyez, vous aurez encore raison, car vous 
vous sauverez. Toute la difference entre les deux 
cas, e'est que le second vous est fort avantageux. 
Des que j'admets qu'une certaine alternative 

71 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1878 J 

existe, et que Poption pour moi n'est possible qu'a 
ce prix que je veuille fournir une contribution per- 
sonnels ; des que je reconnais que cette contribution 
personnels depend d'un certain degre d'energie sub- 
jective, qui lui-meme a besoin, pour se realiser, d'un 
certain degre de foi dans le resultat, et qu'ainsi 
l'avenir possible repose sur la croyance actuelle, je 
dois voir en quelle absurdite profonde je tomberais 
en voulant bannir la methode subjective, la foi de 
l'esprit. Sur l'existenee actuelle de cette foi, la 
possibilite de l'avenir se fonde. Cette foi peut trom- 
per, tres-bien. Les efforts dont elle me rend ca- 
pable peuvent ne pas aboutir a creer un ordre de 
choses qu'elle entrevoit et voudrait determiner; 
voila qui est dit. Eh bien ! ma vie est manquee, c'est 
indubitable ; mais la vie de M. Huxley, par exemple, 
— de M. Huxley, qui ecrivait dernierement : "Croire 
parce qu'on voudrait croire serait faire preuve de 
la derniere immoralite", — cette vie ne serait-elle 
pas tout aussi manquee, s'il se trouvait par hasard 
que la croyance qu'il voudrait proscrire comme 
denuee de garantie objective fut en definitive la 
vraie ! 

Le cas est tou jours possible. Quoi qu'on fasse, 
en ce jeu qu'on appelle la vie, qu'on croie, qu'on 
doute, qu'on nie, on est egalement expose a perdre. 
Est-ce une raison pour ne pas jouer? Non, evi- 
demment ; mais puisque ce qu'on perd est une quan- 
tite fixe ( on ne fait apres tout que payer de sa per- 
sonne), c'est une raison de s'assurer, par tous les 
moyens legitimes qu'on a, qu'au cas que l'on gagne, 

72 



[1878] QUELQUES COXSIDERATIOXS 

le gain soit un maximum. Si, par exemple, on peut, 
en croyant, augmenter le grand Men qu'on poursuit, 
le prix possible, voila nne raison de croire. 

Or, il en est precisement ainsi touchant plusieurs 
de ces questions universelles, qui sont les problemes 
de la philosophie. Prenons celle du pessimisme. 
Sans etre arrive partout a l'etat de dogme philo- 
sophique, comme nous le voyons en Allemagne, le 
pessimisme pose a tout penseur un serieux pro- 
bleme : A quoi bon la vie? ou, comme on dit vulgaire- 
ment, le jeu en vaut-il la chandelle? Si on prend 
parti pour la reponse pessimiste, que gagne-t-on a 
avoir raison? Pas grand'chose, assurement. Au 
contraire, on gagne un maximum, au cas qu'on ait 
raison en decidant en faveur de l'opinion qui tient 
que le monde est bon. Que pouvons-nous faire pour 
que ce monde soit bon? v contribuer de notre part; 
et comment une contribution minime peut-elle chan- 
ger la valeur d ? un total si grand? en ce qu'elle est 
d'une qualite incomparablement superieure. Telle 
est la qualite des faits de la vie morale. 

Soit M la masse des faits independants de moi, 
et soit r ma reaction propre, le contingent des faits 
qui derivent de mon activite personnelle. M con- 
tient, nous le savons, une somme immense de phe- 
nomenes de besoin, misere, vieillesse, douleur, et de 
choses faites pour inspirer le degout et l'effroi. II 
se pourrait alors que r se produisit comme une reac- 
tion du desespoir, fut un acte de suicide, par ex- 
emple, M + r, la totalite avec ce qui me concerne, 
representerait done un etat de choses mauvais de 

73 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1878 J 

tout point. Nul rayon dans cette nuit. Le pes- 
simisme, dans cette hypothese, se trouve paracheve 
par mon acte lui-meme, derive de ma croyance. Le 
voila fait, et j'avais raison de l'affirmer. 

Supposons, au contraire, que le sentiment du mal 
contenu dans M, au lieu de me decourager, n'ait 
fait qu'accroitre ma resistance interieure. Cette 
fois ma reaction sera l'oppose du desespoir; r con- 
tiendra patience, courage, devouement, foi a Fin- 
visible, toutes les vertus heroiques et les joies qui 
decoulent de ces vertus. Or, c'est un fait d'ex- 
perience, et l'empirisme ne peut le contester, que 
de telles joies sont d'une valeur incomparable aupres 
des jouissances purement passives qui se trouvent 
exclues par le fait de la constitution de M telle 
qu'elle est. Si done il est vrai que le bonheur moral 
est le plus grand bonheur actuellement connu; si, 
d'autre part, la constitution de M, par le mal qu'il 
contient et la reaction qu'il provoque, est la condition 
de ce bonheur, n'est-il pas clair que M est au moins 
susceptible d'appartenir au meilleur des mondes? 
Je dis susceptible seulement, parce que tout depend 
du caractere de r. M en soi est ambigu, capable, 
selon le complement qu'il recevra, de figurer dans 
un pessimisme ou dans un optimisme moral. 1 

1 II est clair qu'il ne faut pas dormer ici a ce mot optimisme 
le sens qu'il a regu par rapport aux questions de theodicee, ou 
celui qu'on y attache dans la philosophie de Fhistoire : sens que 
resument les propositions: Tout est Men, Tout est ne'eessaire. 
Mais le pessimisme signifiant ci-dessus la doctrine du Tout est 
mal, on entend sans doute ici par Yoptimisme non pas le con- 
traire logique, mais simplement le contradictoire logique (pour 
employer les termes de l'Ecole) de cette doctrine; a savoir non 

n 



[1S78] QUELQUES CONSIDERATIONS 

II fera difficilement partie d'un optimisme, si 
nous perdons notre energie morale; il pourra en 
faire partie, si nous la conservons. Mais comment 
la conserver, a moins de croire a la possibilite d'une 
reussite, a moins de compter sur l'ayenir et de se 
dire: Ce monde est ~bon, puisque, au point de vue 
moral, il est ce que je le fais, et que je le ferai bon? 
En un mot, comment exclure de la connaissance du 
fait la methode subjective, alors que cette methode 
est le propre instrument de la production du fait? 

En toute proposition dont la portee est uni- 
verselle, il faut que les actes du sujet et leurs suites 
sans fin soient renfermes d'avance dans la formule. 
Telle doit etre l'extension de la formule M + r, 
des qu'on la prend pour representer le monde. Ceci 
pose, nos vceux, nos souhaits etant des coefficients 
reels du terme r, soit en eux-memes, soit par les 
croyances qu'ils nous inspirent ou, si l'on veut, par 
les hypotheses qu'ils nous suggerent, on doit avouer 
que ces croyances engendrent une partie au moins 
de la verite qu'elles affirment. Telles croyances, 
tels faits; d'autres croyances, d'autres faits. Et 
notons bien que tout ceci est independant de la 
question de la liberte absolue ou du determinisme 
absolu. Si nos faits sont determines, c'est que nos 
croyances le sont aussi; mais determinees ou non 
que soient ces dernieres, elles sont une condition 
phenomenale necessairement prealable aux faits, 

pas que tout est bien, mais qu'il est faux que tout soit mal, 
qu'iZ y a du bien, que le monde pent etre bon. Au dela les 
questions subsistent. (Note de la Critique philosophique.) 

75 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1878 J 

necessairement constitutive, par consequent, de la 
verite que nous cherchons a connaitre. 

Voila done la methode subjective justifiee logique- 
ment, pourvu qu'on en limite convenablement 
Pemploi. Elle ne serait que pernicieuse, et il faut 
tneme dire immorale, appliquee a des cas ou les faits 
a formuler ne renfermeraient pas comme facteur le 
terme subjectif r. Mais partout ou entre un tel 
facteur, Papplication en est legitime. Prenons en- 
core ce probleme pour exemple : 

La nature intime du monde est-elle morale, ou 
le monde n'est-il qu'un pur fait, une simple exis- 
tence actuellef C'est au fond la question du mate- 
rialisme. Les positivistes objecteront qu'une ques- 
tion pareille est insoluble, ou meme irrationnelle, 
attendu que la nature intime du monde, existat-elle, 
n'est pas un phenomene et ne peut en consequence 
etre verifiee. Je reponds que toute question a un 
sens et se pose nettement, de laquelle resulte une 
claire alternative pratique, en telle sorte que, selon 
qu'on y reponde d'une maniere ou d'une autre, on 
doive adopter une conduite ou une autre. Or, c'est 
le cas : le materialiste et celui qui affirme une nature 
morale du monde devront agir differemment Tun de 
l'autre en bien des circonstances. Le materialiste, 
quand les faits ne concordent pas avec ses senti- 
ments moraux, est toujours maitre de sacrifier ces 
derniers. Le jugement qu'il porte sur un fait, en 
tant que bon ou mauvaiSj, est relatif a sa constitu- 
tion psychique et en depend; mais cette constitu- 
tion n'etant elle-meme qu'un fait et une donnee, 

76 



[1878] QUELQUES CONSIDERATIONS 

n'est en soi ni bonne ni manvaise. II est done permis 
de la modifier, — d'engourdir, par exemple, le senti- 
ment moral a l'aide de toutes sortes de moyens, — et 
de changer ainsi le jugement, en transformant la 
donnee de laquelle il derive. Au contraire, celui qui 
croit a la nature morale intime du monde, estime 
que les attributs de bien et de mal conviennent a 
tous les phenomenes et s'appliquent aux donnees 
psychiques aussi bien qu'aux faits relatifs a ces 
donnees. II ne saurait done songer, comme a une 
chose toute simple, a fausser ses sentiments. Ses 
sentiments eux-memes doivent, selon lui, etre d'une 
maniere et non d'une autre. 

D'un cote done, resistance au mal, pauvrete ac- 
cepted, martyre s'il le faut, la vie tragique, en un 
mot; de l'autre, les concessions, les accommode- 
ments, les capitulations de conscience et la vie epi- 
curienne; tel est le partage entre les deux croy- 
ances. Observons seulement que leurs divergences 
ne se marquent avec force qu'aux moments decisifs 
et critiques de la vie, quand l'insunisance des maxi- 
mes journalieres oblige de recourir aux grands prin- 
cipes. La, la contradiction eclate. L'un dit: Le 
monde est chose serieuse, partout et toujours, et 
il y a fondements pour le jugement moral. L'autre, 
le materialiste, repond: Qu'importe comment je 
juge, puisque vanitas vanitatum est le fond de tout? 
Le dernier mot de la sagesse aux abois, pour celui-ci, 
e'est anesthesie; pour celui-la, energie. 

On voit que le probleme a un sens, puisqu'il com- 
porte deux solutions contradictoires dans la 

77 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1878 l 

pratique de la vie. Comment savoir a present quelle 
solution est la bonne? Mais comment un savant 
sait-il si son hypothese est la bonne? II la prend 
pour bonne et il procede aux deductions, il agit 
en consequence de ce qu'il a pose. Tot ou tard les 
suites de son activite le detromperont, si son point 
de depart a ete pris faussement. N'en est-il pas ici 
de meme? Nous avons tou jours affaire a M-^-r. Si 
My en sa nature intime, est moral et que r soit 
fourni par un materialiste, ces deux elements sont 
en disaccord et ils iront s'ecartant de plus en plus 
Pun de Pautre. La meme divergence devra s'accuser 
au cas que Pagent regie sa conduite sur la croyance 
que le monde est un fait moral, et que le monde, en 
realite, ne soit qu'un fait brut, une somme de phe- 
nomenestoutmateriels. Des deux parts, il y a attente 
trompee ; d'ou la necessite d'hypotheses subsidiaires, 
et de plus en plus compliquees, comme celles dont 
Phistoire de Pastronomie nous fournit un exemple 
dans la multiplicity des epicycles qu'on dut imaginer 
pour faire cadrer les faits de mieux en mieux ob- 
serves avec le systeme de Ptolemee. Si done le 
partisan du monde moral, en sa croyance, s'est 
determine pour Phypothese fausse, il eprouvera une 
suite de mecomptes et n'arrivera pas definitive- 
ment a la paix du coeur; il restera inconsole dans 
ses peines; son choix tragique ne sera pas Justine. 
Dans le cas contraire, M-\-r f ormant une harmonie 
et non plus un assemblage d'elements disparates, 
le temps irait confirmant Phypothese, et Pagent qui 
Paurait embrassee aurait toujours plus de raisons 

78 



[1878] QUELQUES CONSIDERATIONS 

de se feliciter de son choix: il nagerait pour ainsi 
dire a pleines voiles dans la destinee qu'il se serait 
faite. 

Le moyen est done le meme ici que dans les 
sciences, de prouver qu'une opinion est fondee, et 
nous n'en connaissons pas d'autre. Observons seule- 
ment que, selon les questions, le temps requis pour 
la verification varie. Telle hypothese, en physique, 
sera verifiee au bout d'une demi-heure. Une hypo- 
these comme celle du transformisme demandera 
plus d'une generation pour s'etablir solidement, et 
des hypotheses d'un ordre universel, telles que celles 
dont nous parlons, pourront rester sujettes au doute 
pendant bien des siecles encore. Mais en attendant 
il faut agir, et pour agir il faut choisir son hypo- 
these. Le doute meme equivaut souvent a un choix 
actif. Du moment qu'on est oblige d'opter, il n'y a 
rien de plus rationnel que de donner sa preference a 
celui des partis a prendre pour lequel on se sent 
le plus d'attrait, quitte ensuite a se voir dementi 
et condamne par la nature des choses si Ton a mal 
juge. Au resume foi et working hypothesis sont 
ici la m&me chose. Avec le temps, la verite se 
devoilera. 

Je peux aller plus loin. Je demande pourquoi 
le materialisme et la croyance en un monde moral 
ne seraient pas Vim comme Vautre verifiables de 
la maniere que je viens de dire? Qu'est-ce, en 
d'autres termes, qui empeche que M ne soit essen- 
tiellement ambigu et n'attende de son complement 
r la determination ultime qui le fera ou rentrer 

79 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1878 J 

dans un systeme moral ou se reduire a un systeme 
de faits bruts? 

Le cas est concevable. Telle ligne peut faire 
partie d'un nombre infini de courbes, tel mot pent 
entrer dans beanconp de phrases differentes. Si 
nous avions aft'aire a un cas de ce genre, il ponrrait 
dependre de r de faire pencher la balance en nn sens 
on en Pautre. Agissons, je suppose, en nous in- 
spirant de la croyance en l'univers moral: cette 
verite que le monde est chose tres-serieuse &clatera 
chaque jour da vantage. Au contraire, agissons en 
materialistes, et la suite des temps montrera de 
plus en plus que le monde est chose frivole et que 
vanitas vanitatum est bien le fond de tout. Ainsi 
le monde sera ce que nous le ferons. 

Et qu'on ne me dise pas qu'une chose infime 
telle que r ne saurait changer du tout au tout 
le caractere de M, cette masse immense. Une simple 
particule negative renverse bien le sens des plus 
longues phrases ! Si Ton avait a definir l'univers au 
point de vue de la sensibilite, il faudrait ne re- 
garder qu'au seul regne animal, pourtant si pauvre 
comme fait quantitatif. La definition morale du 
monde pourrait dependre de phenomenes plus re- 
streints encore. Croyons a ce monde-lii: les fruits 
de notre croyance remedieront aux defauts qui 
Pempechaient d'etre. Croyons qu'il n'est qu'une idee 
vaine, et en effet il sera vain. La methode subjec- 
tive est ainsi legitime en pratique et en theorie. 

J'ai deja remarque qu'il n'etait pas question de 
liber te absolue dans les exemples que j'ai pris. 

80 



[1878] QUELQUES CONSIDERATIONS 

Cette liberte pent etre ou n'etre pas reellement. 
Mais si des actes libres sont possibles, ils peuvent 
se produire et devenir plus frequents, grace a la 
methode subjective. En effet, la foi en leur pos- 
sibilite augmente l'energie morale qui les suscite. 
Mais parler de liberte dans la Critique philosophi- 
que, c'est porter de Tor en Californie. J'aime done 
mieux finir et me resumer en disant que je crois 
avoir montre dans la methode subjective autre 
chose que le procede qualifie de honteux par un 
etrange abus de l'esprit soi-disant scientifique. II 
faut passer outre a cette espece de proscription, a 
ce veto ridicule qui, si nous voulions nous y con- > 
former, paralyserait deux de nos plus essentielles 
facultes : celle de nous proposer, en vertu d'un acte 
de croyance, un but qui ne peut etre atteint que par 
nos propres efforts, et celle de nous porter coura- 
geusement a Paction dans les cas ou le succes ne 
nous est pas assure d ? avance. 

Croyez, messieurs, a la sympathie tres-parti- 
culiere avec laquelle je suis, votre tout devoue, 

Wm. James. 

Harvard College, Cambridge (Mass.), Etats-Unis 
d'Amerique, 20 nov. 1877. 



I L'auteur du tres-remarquable article qu'on vient 
de lire fait a la Critique philosopliique beaucoup 

I I This note, as well as that above on p. 74, was presumably 
written by Charles Renouvier, who was at this time editor of 
the Critique Philosophique. Cf. above, p. 26, note. Ed.] 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS U878] 

d'honneur en voulant bien s'etonner de ce qu'il n'a 
pas encore rencontre F expression de ses propres pen- 
sees totidem verbis dans nos pages. II est vrai 
qu'elles sont en tout conformes a la methode criti- 
ciste et nous nous estimerions heureux de pouvoir 
les signer. Mais la maniere dont elles sont presen- 
tees, la forme originale du raisonnement et la saveur a 
la f ois delicate et forte des legons donnees a la f ausse 
science par un homme qui est fort au courant de la 
vraie, impriment un reel cachet de personnalite a 
cette justification de la "methode subjective." Nous 
sommes bien surs que nos lecteurs seront de notre 
avis, dussent-ils faire leurs reserves sur un point ou 
sur un autre, ou plutot reclamer des eclaircisse- 
ments qui parfois ne seraient pas de trop. Quant 
a nous, nous ne manquerons pas de reprendre ce 
grand sujet et d'essayer d'aj outer aux ingenieuses 
demonstrations de M. Wm. James, quelques-uns des 
nombreux commentaires qu'elles sont de nature a 
appeler. 



82 



X 

THE SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 1 

[1879] 
I 

What is the task which philosophers set them- 
selves to perform? And why do they philosophise 
at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: 
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of 
things which shall on the whole be more rational 
than the rather fragmentary and chaotic one which 
everyone by gift of nature carries about with him 
under his hat. But suppose this rational concep- 
tion attained by the philosopher, how is he to rec- 
ognise it for what it is, and not let it slip through 
ignorance? The only answer can be that he will 
recognise its rationality as he recognises everything 
else, by certain subjective marks with which it af- 

C 1 Reprinted from Mind, 1879, 4, 317-346. It was translated 
into French with a note of tribute by C. Renouvier, in Critique 
Philosophique, 1879, 8me annee, 2, 72-89; 113-118; 129-136. 
Portions were combined with "Rationality, Activity and Faith" 
(Princeton Review, 1882, 2, 58-86) to form the essay entitled 
"The Sentiment of Rationality" in The Will to Believe and other 
Essays (1897). For the bearing of this present essay on James's 
general plan, cf. the author's note on p. 136, below. The statement 
of instrumentalism on pp. 86-88 below was reprinted as a note 
in the Principles of Psychology (1890), 2, pp. 335-336. Pencilled 
corrections by the author made in the copy of Mind belonging 
to the Harvard College Library have been adopted in the 
present reprinting. Ed.] 

83 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 l 

fects him. When he gets the marks he may know 
that he has got the rationality. 

What then are the marks? A strong feeling of 
ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition 
from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational 
comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure. 

But this relief seems to be a negative rather than 
a positive character. Shall we then say that the 
feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the 
absence of any feeling of irrationality? I think 
there are very good grounds for upholding such a 
view. All feeling whatever, in the light of certain 
recent psychological speculations, seems to depend 
for its physical condition not on simple discharge 
of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under 
arrest, impediment or resistance. Just as we feel 
no particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but 
a very intense feeling of distress when the respira- 
tory motions are prevented; so any unobstructed 
tendency to action discharges itself without the pro- 
duction of much cogitative accompaniment, and 
any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but 
little feeling. But when the movement is inhibited 
or when the thought meets with difficulties, we ex- 
perience a distress which yields to an opposite 
feeling of pleasure as fast as the obstacle is over- 
come. It is only when the distress is upon us that 
we can be said to strive, to crave, or to aspire. When 
enjoying plenary freedom to energise either in the 
way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of 
anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt 

84 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

Whitman, if we cared to say anything about our- 
selves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am". This 
feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of 
its absoluteness — this absence of all need to explain 
it, account for it or justify it — is what I call the 
Sentiment of Eationality. As soon, in short, as we 
are enabled from any cause whatever to think of a 
thing with perfect fluency, that thing seems to us 
rational. 

Why we should constantly gravitate towards the 
attainment of such fluency cannot here be said. As 
this is not an ethical but a psychological essay, it 
is quite sufficient for our purposes to lay it down 
as an empirical fact that we strive to formulate ra- 
tionally a tangled mass of fact by a propensity as 
natural and invincible as that which makes us ex- 
change a hard high stool for an arm-chair or prefer 
travelling by railroad to riding in a springless cart. 

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facili- 
tate this fluency of our thought, produce the senti- 
ment of rationality. Conceived in such modes 
Being vouches for itself and needs no further philo- 
sophic formulation. But so long as mutually ob- 
structive elements are involved in the conception, 
the pent-up irritated mind recoiling on its present 
consciousness will criticise it, worry over it, and 
never cease in its attempts to discover some new 
mode of formulation which may give it escape from 
the irrationality of its actual ideas. 

Now mental ease and freedom may be obtained in 
various ways. Nothing is more familiar than the 

85 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1879 J 

way in which mere custom makes us at home with 
ideas or circumstances which, when new, filled the 
mind with curiosity and the need of explanation. 
There is no more common sight than that of men's 
mental worry about things incongruous with per- 
sonal desire, and their thoughtless incurious ac- 
ceptance of whatever happens to harmonise with 
their subjective ends. The existence of evil forms 
a "mystery" — a "problem" : there is no "problem 
of happiness". But, on the other hand, purely 
theoretic processes may produce the same mental 
peace which custom and congruity with our native 
impulses in other cases give ; and we have forthwith 
to discover how it is that so many processes can 
produce the same result, and how Philosophy, by 
emulating or using the means of all, may attain 
to a conception of the world which shall be rational 
in the maximum degree, or be warranted in the most 
composite manner against the inroads of mental 
unrest or discontent. 

II 

It will be best to take up first the theoretic way. 
The facts of the world in their sensible diversity 
are always before us, but the philosophic need 
craves that they should be conceived in such a way 
as to satisfy the sentiment of rationality. The 
philosophic quest then is the quest of a conception. 
What now is a conception? It is a teleological 
instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing 
which for our purpose we regard as its essen- 

86 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY. 

tial aspect, as the representative of the entire 
thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever 
other properties and qualities the thing may have, 
are unimportant accidents which we may without 
blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of con- 
ception, varies with the end we have in view. A 
substance like oil has as many different essences as 
it has uses to different individuals. One man con- 
ceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, 
another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a 
hydro-carbon ; the furniture-maker as a darkener of 
wood ; the speculator as a commodity whose market 
price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap- 
boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally 
ascribe to it other essences in relation to their 
needs. Ueberweg's doctrine 1 that the essential 
quality of a thing is the quality of most worth, is 
strictly true ; but Ueberweg has failed to note that 
the worth is wholly relative to the temporary in- 
terests of the conceiver. And, even, when his in- 
terest is distinctly denned in his own mind, the 
discrimination of the quality in the object which 
has the closest connexion with it, is a thing which 
no rules can teach. The only a priori advice that 
can be given to a man embarking on life with a 
certain purpose is the somewhat barren counsel : 
Be sure that in the circumstances that meet you, 
you attend to the right ones for your purpose. To 
pick out the right ones is the measure of the man. 
"Millions," says Hartmann, "stare at the phenome- 

1 Logic, English tr., p. 139. 

87 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 l 

non before a genialer Kopf pounces on the con- 
cept." 1 The genius is simply he to whom, when he 
opens his eyes upon the world, the "right" charac- 
ters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, 
with the same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets 
his attention tangled amid the accidents. 

Schopenhauer expresses well this ultimate truth 
when he says that Intuition (by which in this pas- 
sage he means the power to distinguish at a glance the 
essence amid the accidents) "is not only the source 
of all knowledge, but is knowledge %ai' k&xfy 
... is real insight. . . . Wisdom, the true view of 
life, the right look at things, and the judgment that 
hits the mark, proceed from the mode in which the 
man conceives the world which lies before him. 
. . . He who excels in this talent knows the (Pla- 
tonic) ideas of the world and of life. Every case 
he looks at stands for countless cases; more and 
more he goes on to conceive of each thing in accord- 
ance with its true nature, and his acts like his judg- 
ments bear the stamp of his insight. Gradually 
his face too acquires the straight and piercing look, 
the expression of reason, and at last of wisdom. 
For the direct sight of essences alone can set its 
mark upon the face. Abstract knowledge about 
them has no such effect." 2 

The right conception for the philosopher depends 
then on his interests. Now the interest which he 
has above other men is that of reducing the mani- 

1 Philosophie des Uribewussten, 2te Auflage, p. 249. 
2 Welt als Wille u. Vorstellung, II., p. 83. 

88 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF BATIONALITY 

fold in thought to simple form. We can no more 
say why the philosopher is more peculiarly sensitive 
to this delight, than we can explain the passion 
some persons have for matching colours or for ar- 
ranging cards in a game of solitaire. All these pas- 
sions resemble each other in one point; they are 
all illustrations of what may be called the aesthetic 
Principle of Ease. Our pleasure at finding that 
a chaos of facts is at bottom the expression of a 
single underlying fact is like the relief of the mu- 
sician at resolving a confused mass of sound into 
melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result 
is handled with far less mental effort than the 
original data; and a philosophic conception of na- 
ture is thus in no metaphorical sense a labour- 
saving contrivance. The passion for parsimony, 
for economy of means in thought, is thus the philo- 
sophic passion par excellence, and any character or 
aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up 
their diversity into simplicity will gratify that 
passion, and in the philosopher's mind stand for 
that essence of things compared with which all their 
other determinations may by him be overlooked. 

Mere universality or extensiveness is then the one 
mark the philosopher's conceptions must possess. 
Unless they appear in an enormous number of cases 
they will not bring the relief which is his main 
theoretic need. The knowledge of things by their 
causes, which is often given as a definition of ra- 
tional knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes 
converge to a minimum number whilst still pro- 

89 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS E 1879 l 

during the maximum number of effects. The more 
multiple are the instances he can see to be cases of 
his fundamental concept, the more flowingly does 
his mind rove from fact to fact in the world. The 
phenomenal transitions are no real transitions; 
each item is the same old friend with a slightly 
altered dress. This passion for unifying things may 
gratify itself, as we all know, at truth's expense. 
Everyone has friends bent on system and everyone 
has observed how, when their system has once taken 
definite shape, they become absolutely blind and 
insensible to the most flagrant facts which cannot 
be made to fit into it. The ignoring of data is, in 
fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining 
unity in one's thought. 

But leaving these vulgar excesses let us glance 
briefly at some more dignified contemporary ex- 
amples of the hypertrophy of the unifying passion. 

Its ideal goal gets permanent expression in the 
great notion of Substance, the underlying One in 
which all differences are reconciled. D'Alembert's 
often quoted lines express the postulate in its most 
abstract shape: "L'univers pour qui saurait l'em- 
brasser d'un seul point de vue ne serait, s'il est 
permis de le dire, qu'un fait unique et une grande 
verite." Accordingly Mr. Spencer, after saying on 
page 158 of the first volume of his Psychology, that 
"no effort enables us to assimilate Feeling and 
Motion, they have nothing in common," cannot re- 
frain on page 162 from invoking abruptly an "Un- 
conditional Being common to the two". 

90 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

The craving for Monism at any cost is the parent 
of the entire evolutionist movement of our day, so 
far as it pretends to be more than history. The 
Philosophy of Evolution tries to show how the 
world at any given time may be conceived as abso- 
lutely identical, except in appearance, with itself 
at all past times. What it most abhors is the ad- 
mission of anything which, appearing at a given 
point, should be judged essentially other than what 
went before. Notwithstanding the lacunw in Mr. 
Spencer's system; notwithstanding the vagueness 
of his terms; in spite of the sort of jugglery by 
which his use of the word "nascent" is made to 
veil the introduction of new primordial factors like 
consciousness, as if, like the girl in Midshipman 
Easy, he could excuse the illegitimacy of an infant, 
by saying it was a very little one — in spite of all 
this, I say, Mr. Spencer is, and is bound to be, the 
most popular of all philosophers, because more than 
any other he seeks to appease our strongest theo- 
retic craving. To undiscriminating minds his sys- 
tem will be a sop ; to acute ones a programme full 
of suggestiveness. 

When Lewes asserts in one place that the nerve- 
process and the feeling which accompanies it are 
not two things but only two "aspects" of one and 
the same thing, whilst in other passages he seems 
to imply that the cognitive feeling and the outward 
thing cognised (which is always other than the 
nerve-process accompanying the cognitive act) are 
again one thing in two aspects (giving us thereby 

91 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1879 3 

as the ultimate truth One Thing in Three Aspects, 
very much as Trinitarian Christians affirm it to be 
One God in Three Persons), — the vagueness of his 
mode only testifies to the imperiousness of his need 
of unity. 

The crowning feat of unification at any cost is 
seen in the Hegelian denial of the Principle of Con- 
tradiction. One who is willing to allow that A 
and not-A are one, can be checked by few farther 
difficulties in Philosophy. 



Ill 

But alongside of the passion for simplification, 
there exists a sister passion which in some minds — 
though they perhaps form the minority— is its rival. 
This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the im- 
pulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than 
to comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and 
integrity of perception, dislike of blurred outlines, 
of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It 
loves to recognise particulars in their full complete- 
ness, and the more of these it can carry the happier 
it is. It is the mind of Cuvier versus St. Hilaire, 
of Hume versus Spinoza. It prefers any amount of 
incoherence, abruptness and fragmentariness (so 
long as the literal details of the separate facts are 
saved) to a fallacious unity which swamps things 
rather than explains them. 

Clearness versus Simplicity is then the theoretic 
dilemma, and a man's philosophic attitude is de- 

92 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

termined by the balance in him of these two crav- 
ings. When John Mill insists that the ultimate 
laws of nature cannot possibly be less numerous 
than the distinguishable qualities of sensation 
which we possess, he speaks in the name of this 
aesthetic demand for clearness. When Professor Bain 
says 1 : — "There is surely nothing to be dissatisfied 
with, or to complain of in the circumstance that 
the elements of our experience are in the last resort 
two and not one. . . . Instead of our being 'un- 
fortunate' in not being able to know the essence of 
either matter or mind — in not comprehending their 
union, our misfortune would rather be to have to 
know anything different from what we do know," — 
he is animated by a like motive. All makers of 
architectonic systems like that of Kant, all multi- 
pliers of original principles, all dislikers of vague 
monotony, whether it bear the character of Eleatic 
stagnancy or of Heraclitic change, obey this ten- 
dency. Ultimate kinds of feeling bound together in 
harmony by laws, which themselves are ultimate 
hinds of relation, form the theoretic resting-place 
of such philosophers. 

The unconditional demand which this need makes 
of a philosophy is that its fundamental terms should 
be representable. Phenomena are analysable into 
feelings and relations. Causality is a relation be- 
tween two feelings. To abstract the relation from 
the feelings, to unify all things by referring them 
to a first cause, and to leave this latter relation 

1 "On Mystery, etc." Fortnightly Review, Vol. IV. N.S., p. 394. 

93 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1879 3 

with no term of feeling before it, is to violate the 
fundamental habits of our thinking, to baffle the im- 
agination, and to exasperate the minds of certain 
people much as everyone's eye is exasperated by a 
magic-lantern picture or a microscopic object out of 
focus. Sharpen it, we say, or for heaven's sake re- 
move it altogether. 

The matter is not at all helped when the word 
Substance is brought forward and the primordial 
causality said to obtain between this and the phe- 
nomena ; for Substance in se cannot be directly im- 
aged by feeling, and seems in fact but to be a pecul- 
iar form of relation between feelings — the relation 
of organic union between a group of them and time. 
Such relations, represented as non-phenomenal enti- 
ties, become thus the bete noire and pet aversion of 
many thinkers. By being posited as existent they 
challenge our acquaintance but at the same instant 
defy it by being denned as noumenal. So far is this 
reaction against the treatment of relational terms 
as metempirical entities carried, that the reigning 
British school seems to deny their function even in 
their legitimate sphere, namely as phenomenal ele- 
ments or "laws" cementing the mosaic of our feel- 
ings into coherent form. Time, likeness, and un- 
likeness are the only phenomenal relations our 
English empiricists can tolerate. One of the 
earliest and perhaps the most famous expression 
of the dislike to relations considered abstractedly 
is the well-known passage from Hume: "When we 
run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, 

94 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

what havoc must we make ! If Ave take in our hand 
any volume of divinity or school metaphysic, for 
instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract 
reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. 
Does it contain any experimental reasoning con- 
cerning matter of fact existence? No. Commit it 
then to the flames : for it can contain nothing but 
sophistry and illusion." 1 

Many are the variations which succeeding writers 
have played on this tune. As we spoke of the ex- 
cesses of the unifying passion, so we may now say 
of the craving for clear representability that it 
leads often to an unwillingness to treat any abstrac- 
tions whatever as if they were intelligible. Even 
to talk of space, time, feeling, power, &c, oppresses 
them with a strange sense of uncanniness. Any- 
thing to be real for them must be representable in 
the form of a lump. Its other concrete determi- 
nations may be abstracted from, but its tangible 
thinghood must remain. Minds of this order, if 
they can be brought to psychologise at all, abound 
in such phrases as "tracts" of consciousness, 
"areas" of emotion, "molecules" of feeling, "agglu- 
tinated portions" of thought, "gangs" of ideas, &c, 
&c. 

Those who wish an amusing example of this style 
of thought should read Le Cerveau by the anatomist 
Luys, surely the very worst book ever written on 
the much-abused subject of mental physiology. In 
another work, Psychologie realiste, by P. Sierebois 

1 Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II., p. 135. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1879 3 

(Paris 1876), it is maintained that "our ideas exist 
in us in a molecular condition, and are subject to 
continual movements. . . . Their mobility is as 
great as that of the molecules of air or any gas." 
When we fail to recall a word it is because our ideas 
are hid in some distant corner of the brain whence 
they cannot come to the muscles of articulation, or 
else "they have lost their ordinary fluidity". . . . 
"These ideal molecules are material portions of the 
brain which differs from all other matter precisely 
in this property which it possesses of subdividing 
itself into very attenuated portions which easily 
take on the likeness in form and quality of all ex- 
ternal objects." In other words, when I utter the 
word 'rhinoceros' an actual little microscopic 
rhinoceros gallops towards my mouth. 

A work of considerable acuteness, far above the 
vulgar materialistic level, is that of Czolbe, Grund- 
ziige einer extensionalen Erkenntnisstheorie (1875) . 
This author explains our ideas to be extended sub- 
stances endowed with mutual penetrability. The 
matter of which they are composed is "elastic like 
india-rubber". When "concentrated" by "mag- 
netic self-attraction" into the middle of the brain, 
its "intensity" is such that it becomes conscious. 
When the attraction ceases, the idea-substance ex- 
pands and diffuses itself into infinite space and so 
sinks from consciousness. 

Again passing over these gi^asi-pathological ex- 
cesses, we come to a permanent and, for our purpose, 
most important fact — the fact that many minds of 

96 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF EATIONALITY 

the highest analytic power will tolerate in Philoso- 
phy no unifying terms but elements immanent in 
phenomena, and taken in their phenomenal and rep- 
resentable sense. Entities whose attributes are not 
directly given in feeling, phenomenal relations 
functioning as entities, are alike rejected. Spino- 
zistic Substance, Spencerian Unknowable, are ab- 
horred as unrepresentable things, numerically addi- 
tional to the representable world. The substance 
of things for these clear minds can be no more than 
their common measure. The phenomena bear to it 
the same relation that the different numbers bear 
to unity. These contain no other matter than the 
repeated unit, but they may be classed as prime 
numbers, odd numbers, even numbers, square num- 
bers, cube numbers, &c, just as truly and naturally 
as we class concrete things. The molecular motions, 
of which physicists hope that some day all events 
and properties will be seen to consist, form such an 
immanent unity of colossal simplifying power. The 
"infinitesimal event" of various modern writers, 
Taine for example, with its two "aspects," inner 
and outer, reaches still farther in the same direc- 
tion. Writers of this class, if they deal with Psy- 
chology, repudiate the "soul" as a scholastic entity. 
The phenomenal unity of consciousness must flow 
from some element immutably present in each and 
every representation of the individual and binding 
the whole into one. To unearth and accurately de- 
fine this phenomenal self becomes one of the funda- 
mental tasks of Psychology. 

97 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1879 J 

But the greatest living insister on the principle 
that unity in our account of things shall not over- 
whelm clearness, is Charles Renouvier. His mas- 
terly exposition of the irreducible categories of 
thought in his Essais de Critique generate ought 
to be far better known among us than it is. The on- 
slaughts which this eminently clear-headed writer 
has made and still makes in his weekly journal, 
the Critique Philosophique, on the vanity of the 
evolutionary principle of simplification, which sup- 
poses that you have explained away all distinctions 
by simply saying "they arise" instead of "they are," 
form the ablest criticism which the school of Evolu- 
tion has received. Difference "thus displaced, trans- 
ported from the esse to the -fieri, is it any the less 
postulated? And does the -fieri itself receive the 
least commencement of explanation when we sup- 
pose that everything which occurs, occurs little by 
little, by insensible degrees, so that, if we look at 
any one of these degrees, what happens does so as 
easily and clearly as if it did not happen at all? . . . 
If we want a continuous production ex niliilo, why 
not say so frankly, and abandon the idea of a 
'transition without break' which explains really 
nothing?" 1 

1 Critiaue Philosophique, 12 Juillet, 1877, p. 383. 



98 



t!879] SENTIMEXT OF RATIONALITY 

IV 

Our first conclusion may then be this : Xo sys- 
tem of philosophy can hope to be universally ac- 
cepted among men which grossly violates either of 
the two great aesthetic needs of our logical nature, 
the need of unity and the need of clearness, or 
entirely subordinates the one to the other. Doc- 
trines of mere disintegration like that of Hume and 
his successors, will be as widely unacceptable on 
the one hand as doctrines of merely engulphing sub- 
stantialism like those of Schopenhauer, Hartmann 
and Spencer on the other. Can we for our own 
guidance briefly sketch out here some of the con- 
ditions of most favourable compromise? 

In surveying the connexions between data we are 
immediately struck by the fact that some are more 
intimate than others. Propositions which express 
those we call necessary truths; and with them we 
contrast the laxer collocations and sequences which 
are known as empirical, habitual or merely fortui- 
tous. The former seem to have an inward reason- 
ableness which the latter are deprived of. The link, 
whatever it be, which binds the two phenomena to- 
gether, seems to extend from the heart of one into 
the heart of the next, and to be an essential reason 
why the facts should always and indefeasibly be as 
we now know them. "Within the pale we stand." 
As Lotze says 1 : "The intellect is not satisfied with 
merely associated representations. In its constant 

1 Microcosmus, 2d ed. I., p. 261. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1879 1 

critical activity thought seeks to refer each repre- 
sentation to the rational ground which conditions 
the alliance of what is associated and proves that 
what is grouped belongs together. So it separates 
from each other those impressions which merely 
coalesce without inward connexions, and it renews 
(while corroborating them) the bonds of those 
which, by the inward kinship of their content, have 
a right to permanent companionship." 

On the other hand many writers seem to deny the 
existence of any such inward kinship or rational 
bond between things. Hume says : "All our distinct 
perceptions are distinct existences and the mind 
never perceives any real connexion among distinct 
existences." 1 

Hume's followers are less bold in their utterances 
than their master, but throughout all recent British 
Nominalism we find the tendency to enthrone mere 
juxtaposition as lord of all and to make of the 
Universe what has well been styled a Nulliverse. 
"For my part," says Professor Huxley, "I utterly re- 
pudiate and anathematise the intruder [Necessity], 
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this 
Necessity, save an empty shadow of the mind's own 
throwing?" 

And similarly J. S. Mill writes : "What is called 
explaining one law by another is but substituting 
one mystery for another, and does nothing to render 
the course of nature less mysterious. We can no 
more assign a why for the more extensive laws than 

1 Treatise on Human Nature, ed. T. H. Green, I., p. 559. 

100 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

for the partial ones. The explanation may substi- 
tute a mystery which has become familiar and has 
grown to seem not mysterious for one which is still 
strange. And this is the meaning of explanation in 
common parlance. . . . The laws thus explained or 
resolved are said to be accounted for; but the ex- 
pression is incorrect if taken to mean anything more 
than what has been stated." 1 

And yet the very pertinacity with which such 
writers remind us that our explanations are in a 
strict sense of the word no explanations at all ; that 
our causes never unfold the essential nature of their 
effects; that we never seize the inward reason why 
attributes cluster as they do to form things, seems 
to prove that they possess in their minds some ideal 
or pattern of what a genuine explanation would be 
like in case they should meet it. How could they 
brand our current explanations as spurious, if they 
had no positive notion whatever of the real thing? 

Now have we the real thing? And yet may they 
be partly right in their denials ? Surely both ; and 
I think that the shares of truth may be easily as- 
signed. Our "laws" are to a great extent but facts 
of larger growth, and yet things are inwardly and 
necessarily connected notwithstanding. The entire 
process of philosophic simplification of the chaos of 
sense consists of two acts, Identification and Asso- 
ciation. Both are principles of union and therefore 
of theoretic rationality ; but the rationality between 
things associated is outward and custom-bred. Only 

1 Logic, 8th Edition, I., p. 549. 

101 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS C 18 ^ 

when things are identified do we pass inwardly and 
necessarily from one to the other. 

The first step towards unifying the chaos is to 
classify its items. "Every concrete thing/' says 
Professor Bain, "falls into as many classes as it has 
attributes." 1 When we pick out a certain attribute 
to conceive it by, we literally and strictly identify it 
in that respect with the other concretes of the class 
having that attribute for its essence, concretes 
which the attribute recalls. When we conceive of 
sugar as a white thing it is pro tanto identical with 
snow ; as a sweet thing it is the same as liquorice ; 
qua hydro-carbon, as starch. The attribute picked 
out may be per se most uninteresting and familiar, 
but if things superficially very diverse can be found 
to possess it buried within them and so be assimi- 
lated with each other, "the mind feels a peculiar and 
genuine satisfaction. . . . The intellect, oppressed 
with the variety and multiplicity of facts, is joyfully 
relieved by the simplification and the unity of a 
great principle." 2 

Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the 
moon and the apple are, as far as their relation to 
earth goes, identical? of knowing respiration and 
combustion to be one? of understanding that the 
balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone 
sinks? of feeling that the warmth in one's palm 
when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with the 
motion which the friction checks? of recognising 
the difference between beast and fish to be only a 

1 M ent. and Mor. Science, p. 107. 
3 Bain, Logic, II., p. 120. 

102 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

higher degree of that between human father and 
son? of believing our strength when we climb or 
chop to be no other than the strength of the sun's 
rays which made the oats grow out of which we 
got our morning meal? 

We shall presently see how the attribute perform- 
ing this unifying function, becomes associated with 
some other attribute to form what is called a gen- 
eral law. But at present we must note that many 
sciences remain in this first and simplest classifica- 
tory stage. A classificatory science is merely one 
the fundamental concepts of which have few asso- 
ciations or none with other concepts. When I say 
a man, a lizard, and a frog are one in being verte- 
brates, the identification, delightful as it is in itself, 
leads me hardly any farther. "The idea that all 
the parts of a flower are modified leaves, reveals a 
connecting law, which surprises us into acquies- 
cence. But now try and define the leaf, determine 
its essential characteristics, so as to include all the 
forms that we have named. You will find your- 
self in a difficulty, for all distinctive marks vanish, 
and you have nothing left, except that a leaf in this 
wider sense of the term is a lateral appendage of 
the axis of a plant. Try then to express the propo- 
sition 'the parts of a flower are modified leaves' in 
the language of scientific definition, and it reads, 
'the parts of the flower are lateral appendages of 
the axis'." 1 Truly a bald result ! Yet a dozen years 
ago there hardly lived a naturalist who was not 

1 Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures, p. 47. 
103 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1879 l 

thrilled with rapture at identifications in "philo- 
sophic" anatomy and botany exactly on a par with 
this. Nothing could more clearly show that the 
gratification of the sentiment of rationality depends 
hardly at all on the worth of the attribute which 
strings things together but almost exclusively on 
the mere fact of their being strung at all. Theologi- 
cal implications were the utmost which the attri- 
butes of archetypal zoology carried with them, but 
the wretched poverty of these proves how little 
they had to do with the enthusiasm engendered by 
archetypal identifications. Take Agassiz's concep- 
tion of class-characters, order-characters, &c, as 
"thoughts of God." What meagre thoughts ! Take 
Owen's archetype of the vertebrate skeleton as re- 
vealing the artistic temperament of the Creator. It 
is a grotesque figure with neither beauty nor ethical 
suggestiveness, fitted rather to discredit than 
honour the Divine Mind. In short the conceptions 
led no farther than the identification pure and 
simple. The transformation which Darwin has ef- 
fected in the classificatory sciences is simply this — 
that in his theory the class-essence is not a unify- 
ing attribute pure and simple, but an attribute with 
wide associations. When a frog, a man and a lizard 
are recognised as one, not simply in having the 
same back-bone, &c, but in being all offspring of one 
parent, our thought instead of coming to a stand- 
still, is immediately confronted with further prob- 
lems and, we hope, solutions. Who were that par- 
ent's ancestors and cousins? Why was he chosen 

104 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

out of all to found such an enormous line? Why did 
he himself perish in the struggle to survive? etc. 

Association of class-attributes, inter se, is thus 
the next great step in the mind's simplifying in- 
dustry. By it Empirical Laws are founded and 
sciences, from classificatory, become explanatory. 
Without it we should be in the position of a judge 
who could only decide that the cases in his court 
belonged each to a certain class, but who should be 
inhibited from passing sentence, or attaching to the 
class-name any further notion of duty, liability, or 
penalty. This coupling of the class-concept with 
certain determinate consequences associated there- 
withal, is what is practically important in the laws 
of nature as in those of society. 

When, for example, we have identified prisms, 
bowls of water, lenses and strata of air as distort- 
ing media, the next step is to learn that all distort- 
ing media refract light rays towards the perpendic- 
ular. Such additional determination makes a law. 
But this law itself may be as inscrutable as the 
concrete fact we started from. The entrance of a 
ray and its swerving towards the perpendicular, 
may be simply associated properties, with, for aught 
we see, no inwardly necessary bond, coupled to- 
gether as empirically as the colour of a man's eyes 
with the shape of his nose. 

But such an empirical law may have its terms 
again classified. The essence of the medium may 
be to retard the light-wave's speed. The essence 
(in an obliquely-striking wave) of deflexion towards 

105 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1879 ^ 

the perpendicular may be earlier retardation of that 
part of the wave-front which enters first, so that 
the remaining portion swings round it before get- 
ting in. Medium and bending towards perpendicu- 
lar thus coalesce into the one identical fact of 
retardation. This being granted gives an inward 
explanation of all above it. But retardation itself 
remains an empirical coupling of medium and light- 
movement until we have classified both under a 
single concept. The explanation reached by the 
insight that two phenomena are at bottom one and 
the same phenomenon, is rational in the ideal and 
ultimate sense of the word. The ultimate identifi- 
cation of the subject and predicate of a mathemati- 
cal theorem, an identification which we can always 
reach in our reasonings, is the source of the inward 
necessity of mathematical demonstration. We see 
that the top and bottom of a parallelogram must 
be equal as soon as we have unearthed in the paral- 
lelogram the attribute that it consists of two equal, 
juxtaposed triangles of which its top and bottom 
form homologous sides — that is, as soon as we have 
seen that top and bottom have an identical essence, 
their length, as being such sides, and that their po- 
sition is an accident. This criterion of identity is 
that which we all unconsciously use when we dis- 
criminate between brute fact and explained fact. 
There is no other test. 

In the contemporary striving of physicists to in- 
terpret every event as a case of motion concealed or 
visible, we have an adumbration of the way in which 

106 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

a common essence may make the sensible hetero- 
geneity of things inwardly rational. The cause is 
one motion, the effect the same motion transferred 
to other molecules ; in other words, physics aims at 
the same kind of rationality as mathematics. In 
the second volume of Lewes's Problems we find this 
anti-Humean view that the effect is the "procession" 
of the cause, or that they are one thing in two 
aspects brought prominently forward. 1 

And why, on the other hand, do all our contem- 
porary physical philosophers so vie with each other 
in the zeal with which they reiterate that in reality 
nerve-processes and brain-tremors "explain" noth- 
ing of our feelings? Why does "the chasm between 
the two classes of phenomena still remain intel- 
lectually impassable"? 2 Simply because, in the 
words of Spencer which we quoted a few pages 
back, feeling and motion have nothing whatever 
in common, no identical essence by which we can 
conceive both, and so, as Tyndall says, "pass by a 
process of reasoning from one to the other." The 
"double-aspect" school postulate the blank form of 
"One and the Same Fact," appeal to the image of the 
circle which is both convex and concave, and think 
that they have by this symbolic identification made 
the matter seem more rational. 

1 This view is in growing favour with thinkers fed from 
empirical sources. See Wundt's Physikalische Axiome and the 
important article by A. Riehl, "Causalitat und Identitat," in 
Vierteljahrssch. f. iviss. Philos. Bd. I., p. 265. The Humean 
view is ably urged by Chauncey Wright, Philosophical Discus- 
sions, N.Y., 1877, p. 406. 

2 Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 2d ed., p. 121. 

107 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS E 1879 l 

Thus then the connexions of things become 
strictly rational only when, by successive substitu- 
tions of essences for things, and higher for lower 
essences, we succeed in reaching a point of view 
from which we can view the things as one. A and 
B are concretes ; a and b are partial attributes with 
which for the present case we conceive them to be 
respectively identical (classify them) and which 
are coupled by a general law. M is a further attri- 
bute which rationally explains the general law as 
soon as we perceive it to form the essence of both 
a and b, as soon as we identify them with each other 
through it. The softening of asphalt pavements in 
August is explained first by the empirical law that 
heat, which is the essence of August, produces melt- 
ing, which is the essence of the pavement's change, 
and secondly this law is inwardly rationalised by 
the conception of both heat and melting being at 
the bottom one and the same fact, namely, increased 
molecular mobility. 

Proximate and ultimate explanations are then 
essentially the same thing. Classification involves 
all that is inward in any explanation, and a per- 
fected rationalisation of things means only a com- 
pleted classification of them. Every one feels that 
all explanation whatever, even by reference to the 
most proximate empirical law, does involve some- 
thing of the essence of inward rationalisation. How 
else can we understand such words as these from 
Professor Huxley? "The fact that it is impossible 
to comprehend how it is that a physical state gives 

108 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

rise to a mental state, no more lessens the value of 
our [empirical] explanation of the latter case, than 
the fact that it is utterly impossible to comprehend 
how motion is communicated from one body to an- 
other weakens the force of the explanation of the 
motion of one billiard-ball by showing that another 
has hit it." 1 

To return now to the philosophic problem. It is 
evident that our idea of the universe cannot assume 
an inwardly rational shape until each separate 
phenomenon is conceiA^ed as fundamentally identi- 
cal with every other. But the important fact to 
notice is that in the steps by which this end is 
reached the really rationalising, pregnant moments 
are the successive steps of conception, the moments 
of picking out essences. The association of these 
essences into laws, the empirical coupling, is done 
by nature for us and is hardly worthy to be called 
an intellectual act, and on the other hand the coales- 
cence-into-one of all items in which the same essence 
is discerned, in other words the perception that an 
essence whether ultimate, simple and universal, or 
proximate and specific, is identical with itself 
wherever found, is a barren truism. The living 
question always is, Where is it found? To stand 
before a phenomenon and say what it is; in other 
words to pick out from it the embedded character 
(or characters) also embedded in the maximum 
number of other phenomena, and so identify it with 
them — here lie the stress and strain, here the test of 

1 "Modern Symposium," XlXth Century, Vol. I., 1877. 
109 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 3 

the philosopher. So we revert to what we said far 
back: the genius can do no more than this; in 
Butler's words : 

"He knows what's what, and that's as high 
As metaphysic wit can fly." 1 
1 This doctrine is perfectly congruous with the conclusion that 
identities are the only propositions necessary a priori, though 
of course it does not necessarily lead to that conclusion, since 
there may be in things elements which are not simple but 
bilateral or synthetic, like straightness and shortness in a line, 
convexity and concavity in a curve. Should the empiricists 
succeed in their attempt to resolve such Siamese-twin elements 
into habitual juxtapositions, the Principle of Identity would 
become the only a priori truth, and the philosophic problem 
like all our ordinary problems would become a question as to 
facts : What are these facts which we perceive to exist? Are 
there any existing facts corresponding to this or that conceived 
class? Lewes, in the interesting discussion on necessary and 
contingent truth in the Prolegomena to his History and in Chap- 
ter XIII. of his first Problem, seems at first sight to take up an 
opposite position, in that tie maintains our commonly so-called 
contingent truths to be really necessary. But his treatment of 
the question most beautifully confirms the doctrine I have ad- 
vanced in the text. If the proposition "A is B" is ever true, he 
says it is so necessarily. But he proves the necessity by show- 
ing that what we mean by A is its essential attribute x, and 
what we mean by B is again x. Only in so far as A and B are 
identical is the proposition true. But he admits that a fact 
sensibly just like A may lack x, and a fact sensibly unlike B 
may have it. In either case the proposition, to be true, must 
change. The contingency which he banishes from propositions, 
he thus houses in their terms ; making as I do the act of con- 
ception, subsumption, classification, intuition, naming, or what- 
ever else one may prefer to call it, the pivot on which thought 
turns. Before this act there is infinite indeterminateness — A 
and B may be anything. After the act there is the absolute 
certainty of truism — all a?'s are the same. In the act — is A, 
at? is B, x? or not? — we have the sphere of truth and error, of 
living experience, in short, of Fact. As Lewes himself says: 
"The only necessity is that a thing is what it is; the only 
contingency is that our proposition may not state what the thing 
is" (Problems, Vol. I., p. 395). 

110 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 



We have now to ask ourselves how far this identi- 
fication may be legitimately carried and what, when 
perfected, its real worth is. But before passing to 
these further questions we had best secure our 
ground by defending our fundamental notion itself 
from nominalistic attacks. The reigning British 
school has always denied that the same attribute is 
identical with itself in different individuals. I 
started above with the assumption that when we 
look at a subject with a certain purpose, regard it 
from a certain point of view, some one attribute 
becomes its essence and identifies it, pro hac vice, 
with a class. To this James Mill replies : "But what 
is meant by a mode of regarding things? This is 
mysterious ; and is as mysteriously explained, when 
it is said to be the taking into view the particulars 
in which individuals agree. For what is there, 
which it is possible for the mind to take into view, 
in that in which individuals agree? Every colour 
is an individual colour, every size is an individual 
size, every shape is an individual shape. But 
things have no individual colour in common, no 
individual shape in common ; no individual size in 
common; that is to say, they have neither shape, 
colour, nor size in common. What, then, is it which 
they have in common, which the mind can take into 
view? Those who affirmed that it was something, 
could by no means tell. They substituted words 
for things; using vague and mystical phrases, 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 1879 1 

which, when examined, meant nothing;" 1 the truth 
being according to this heroic author, that the 
only thing that can be possessed in common is a 
name. Black in the coat and black in the shoe 
agree only in that both are named black — the fact 
that on this view the name is never the same when 
used twice being quite overlooked. But the blood 
of the giants has grown weak in these days, and the 
nominalistic utterances of our contemporaries are 
like sweet-bells jangled, sadly out of tune. If they 
begin with a clear nominalistic note, they are sure 
to end with a grating rattle which sounds very 
like universalia in re, if not ante rem. In M. Taine, 2 
who may fairly be included in the British School, 
they are almost ante rem. This bruit de cloche 
felee, as the doctors say, is pathognomonic of the 
condition of Ockham's entire modern progeny. 

But still we may find expressions like this: 
"When I say that the sight of any object gives me 
the same sensation or emotion to-day that it did 
yesterday, or the same which it gives to some other 

1 Analysis, Vol. I., p. 249. 
3 How can M. Taine fail to have perceived that the entire 
doctrine of "Substitution" so clearly set forth in the nomi- 
nalistic beginning of his brilliant book is utterly senseless ex- 
cept on the supposition of realistic principles like those which 
he so admirably expounds at its close? How can the image be 
a useful substitute for the sensation, the tendency for the image, 
the name for the tendency, unless sensation, image, tendency 
and name be identical in some respect, in respect namely of 
function, of the relations they enter into? Were this realistic 
basis laid at the outset of Taine's De V Intelligence, it would 
be one of the most consistent instead of one of the most self- 
contradictory works of our day. 

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[1S79] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

person, this is evidently an incorrect application 
of the word same; for the feeling which I had yes- 
terday is gone never to return. . . . Great con- 
fusion of ideas is often produced, and many falla- 
cies engendered, in otherwise enlightened under- 
standings, by not being sufficiently alive to the 
fact (in itself not always to be avoided), that they 
use the same name to express ideas so different as 
those of identity and undistinguishable resem- 
blance." 1 

What are the exact facts? Take the sensation I 
got from a cloud yesterday and from the snow to- 
day. The white of the snow and that of the cloud 
differ in place, time and associates; they agree in 
quality, and we may say in origin, being in all prob- 
ability both produced by the activity of the same 
brain tract. Nevertheless, John Mill denies our 
right to call the quality the same. He says that it 
essentially differs in every different occasion of its 
appearance, and that no two phenomena of which 
it forms part are really identical even as far as it 
goes. Is it not obvious that to maintain this view 
he must abandon the phenomenal plane altogether? 
Phenomenally considered, the white per se is identi- 
cal with itself wherever found in snow or in cloud, 
to-day or to-morrow. If any nominalist deny the 
identity I ask him to point out the difference. Ex 
hypothesi the qualities are sensibly indistinguish- 
able, and the only difference he can indicate is that 
of time and place; but these are not differences in 

1 J. S. Mill, Logic, 8th Ed., I., p. 77. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS E 1879 l 

the quality. If our quality be not the same with 
itself, what meaning has the word "same"? Our 
adversary though silenced may still grudge assent, 
but if he analyse carefully the grounds of this re- 
luctance he will, I think, find that it proceeds from 
a difficulty in believing that the cause of the quality 
can be just the same at different times. In other 
words he abandons altogether the platform of the 
sensible phenomenon and ascends into the empy- 
rean, postulating some inner noumenal principle 
of quality + time + place + concomitants. The en- 
tire group being never twice alike, of course this 
ground, or being in se, of the quality must each time 
be distinct and, so to speak, personal. This tran- 
scendental view is frankly avowed by Mr. Spencer 
in his Psychology, II., p. 63 (the passage is too 
complex to quote) ; but all nominalists must start 
from it, if they think clearly at all. 1 

We, who are phenomenists, may leave all meta- 
physical entities which have the power of produc- 
ing whiteness to their fate, and content ourselves 
with the irreversible datum of perception that the 
whiteness after it is manifested is the same, be it 
here or be it there. Of all abstractions such entities 

1 1 fear that even after this some persons will remain uncon- 
vinced, but then it seems to me the matter has become a dispute 
about words. If my supposed adversary, when he says that 
different times and places prevent a quality which appears in 
them from ever being twice the same, will admit that they do 
not make it in any conceivable way different, I will willingly 
abandon the words "same" and "identical" to his fury ; though 
I confess it becomes rather inconvenient to have no single posi- 
tive word left by which to indicate complete absence of differ- 
ence. 

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[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIOXALITY 

are the emptiest, being ontological hypostatisations 
of the mere susceptibility of being distinguished, 
whilst this susceptibility has its real, nameable, 
phenomenal ground all the while, in the time, place, 
and relations affected by the attribute considered. 

The truly wise man will take the phenomenon in 
its entirety and permanently sacrifice no one aspect 
to another. Time, place, and relations differ, he 
will freely say ; but let him just as freely admit that 
the quality is identical with itself through all these 
differences. Then if, to satisfy the philosophical in- 
terest, it becomes needful to conceive this identical 
part as the essence of the several entire phenomena, 
he will gladly call them one ; whilst if some other 
interest be paramount, the points of difference will 
become essential and the identity an accident. 
Kealism is eternal and invincible in this phenomenal 
sense. 

We have thus vindicated against all assailants 
our title to consider the world as a matter suscepti- 
ble of rational formulation in the deepest, most 
inward sense, and not as a disintegrated sand-heap ; 
and we are consequently at liberty to ask: (1) 
Whether the mutual identification of its items meet 
with any necessary limit; and (2) What, suppos- 
ing the operation completed, its real worth and 
import amount to. 

VI 

In the first place, when we have rationally ex- 
plained the connexion of the items A and B by iden- 

115 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS B»W 

tifying both with their common attribute x, it is 
obvious that we have really explained only so much 
of these items as is x. To explain the connexion 
of choke-damp and suffocation by the lack of oxygen 
is to leave untouched all the other peculiarities both 
of choke-damp and of suffocation, such as convul- 
sions and agony on the one hand, density and ex- 
plosibility on the other. In a word, so far as A 
and B contain I, m, n and o, p, q, respectively, in 
addition to w, they are not explained by x. Each 
additional particularity makes its distinct appeal 
to our rational craving. A single explanation of a 
fact only explains it from a single point of view. 1 
The entire fact is not accounted for until each and 
all of its characters have been identified with their 
likes elsewhere. To apply this now to universal 
formulas we see that the explanation of the world 
by molecular movements explains it only so far as 
it actually is such movements. To invoke the "Un- 
knowable" explains only so much as is unknow- 
able; "Love" only so much as is love; "Thought," 
so much as is thought; "Strife," so much as is strife. 
All data whose actual phenomenal quality cannot 

1 In the number of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 
April, 1879, Prof. John Watson most admirably asserts and 
expresses the truth which constitutes the back-bone of this 
article, namely that every manner of conceiving a fact is rela- 
tive to some interest, and that there are no absolutely essential 
attributes — every attribute having the right to call itself es- 
sential in turn, and the truth consisting of nothing less than 
all of them together. I avow myself unable to comprehend as 
yet this author's Hegelian point of view, but his pages 164 to 
172 are a most welcome corroboration of what I have striven 
to advance in the text. 

116 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

be identified with the attribute invoked as Uni- 
versal Principle, remain outside as ultimate, inde- 
pendent kinds or natures, associated by empirical 
laws with the fundamental attribute but devoid of 
truly rational kinship with it. If A and B are to 
be thoroughly rationalized together, I, m, n, and o, 
p, q, must each and all turn out to be so many cases 
of x in disguise. This kind of wholesale identifica- 
tion is being now attempted by physicists when 
they conceive of all the ancient, separate Forces 
as so many determinations of one and the same 
essence, molecular mass, position and velocity. 

Suppose for a moment that this idea were carried 
out for the physical world, — the subjective sensa- 
tions produced by the different molecular energies, 
colour, sound, taste, etc., etc., the relations of like- 
ness and contrast, of time and position, of ease 
and effort, the emotions of pain and delight, in 
short, all the mutually irreducible categories of 
mental life, would still remain over. Certain 
writers strive in turn to reduce all these to a com- 
mon measure, the primordial unit of feeling, or 
infinitesimal mental event which builds them up 
as bricks build houses. But this case is wholly 
different from the last. The physical molecule is 
conceived not only as having a being in se apart 
from representation, but as being essentially of 
representable kind. With magnified perceptions we 
should actually see it. The mental molecule, on the 
other hand, has by its very definition no existence 
except in being felt, and yet by the same definition 

117 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS W 

never is felt. It is neither a fact in consciousness 
nor a fact out of consciousness, and falls to the 
ground as a transcendental absurdity. Nothing 
could be more inconclusive than the empirical argu- 
ments for the existence of this noumenal feeling 
which Taine and Spencer draw from the sense of 
hearing. 

But let us waive for an instant all this and sup- 
pose our feelings reduced to one. We should then 
have two primordial natures, the molecule of matter 
and the molecule of mind, coupled by an empirical 
law. Phenomenally incommensurable, the attempt 
to reduce them to unity by calling them two "as- 
pects" is vain so long as it is not pointed out who 
is there adspicere; and the Machtspruch that they 
are expressions of one underlying Reality has no 
rationalising function so long as that reality is con- 
fessed unknowable. Nevertheless the absolute ne- 
cessity of an identical material substratum for the 
different species of feeling on the one hand, and the 
genera feeling and motion on the other, if we are 
to have any evolutionary explanation of things, will 
lead to ever renewed attempts at an atomistic 
hylozoism. Already Clifford and Taine, Spencer, 
Fechner, Zollner, G. S. Hall, and more besides, 
have given themselves up to this ideal. 

But again let us waive this criticism and admit 
that even the chasm between feeling and motion 
may be rationally bridged by the conception of the 
bilateral atom of being. Let us grant that this 
atom by successive compoundings with its fellows 

118 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

builds up the universe ; is it not still clear that each 
item in the universe would still be explained only 
as to its general quality and not as to its other par- 
ticular determinations? The particulars depend on 
the exact number of primordial atoms existing at 
the outset and their exact distances from each other. 
The "universal formula" of Laplace which Du Bois- 
Keymond has made such striking use of in his lec- 
ture TJeber die Grenzen des ~Naturerkenncns, cannot 
possibly get along with fewer than this almost in- 
finite number of data. Their homogeneity does not 
abate their infinity — each is a separate empirical 
fact. 

And when we now retract our provisional admis- 
sions, and deny that feelings incommensurable inter 
se and with motion can be possibly unified, we see at 
once that the reduction of the phenomenal Chaos 
to rational form must stop at a certain point. It 
is a limited process, — bounded by the number of 
elementary attributes which cannot be mutually 
identified, the specific qualia of representation, on 
the one hand, and, on the other, by the number of 
entities (atoms or monads or what not) with their 
complete mathematical determinations, requisite 
for deducing the fulness of the concrete world. All 
these irreducible data form a system, no longer 
phenomenally rational, inter se, but bound together 
by what are for us empirical laws. We merely find 
the system existing as a matter of fact, and write 
it down. In short, a plurality of categories and an 
immense number of primordial entities, determined 

119 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 l 

according to these categories, is the minimum of 
philosophic baggage, the only possible compromise 
between the need of clearness and the need of unity. 
All simplification, beyond this point, is reached 
either by throwing away the particular concrete 
determinations of the fact to be explained, or else 
it is illusory simplification. In the latter case it 
is made by invoking some sham term, some pseudo- 
principle, and conglomerating it and the data into 
one. The principle may be an immanent element 
but no true universal : Sensation, Thought, Will are 
principles of this kind ; or it may be a transcendent 
entity like Matter, Spirit, Substance, the Unknow- 
able, the Unconscious, &C. 1 Such attempts as these 
latter do but postulate unification, not effect; and 
if taken avowedly to represent a mere claim, may 
be allowed to stand. But if offered as actual ex- 
planations, though they may serve as a sop to the 
rabble, they can but nauseate those whose philo- 
sophic appetite is genuine and entire. If we choose 
the former mode of simplification and are willing 
to abstract from the particulars of time, place and 
combination in the concrete world, we may simplify 
our elements very much by neglecting the numbers 
and collocations of our primordial elements and 
attending to their qualitative categories alone. The 
system formed by these will then really rationalise 
the universe so far as its qualities go. Nothing can 

1 The idea of "God" in its popular function is open to neither 
of these objections, being conceived as a phenomenon standing 
in causal relation to other phenomena. As such, however, it 
has no unifying function of a properly explanatory kind. 

120 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

happen in it incommensurable with these data, and 
practically this abstract treatment of the world 
as quality is all that philosophers aim at. They are 
satisfied when they can see it to be a place in which 
none but these qualities appear, and in which the 
same quality appears not only once but identically 
repeats itself. They are willing to ignore, or leave 
to special sciences the knowledge of what times, 
places and concomitants the recurring quality is 
likely to affect. The Essais de Critique generate of 
Renouvier form, to my mind, by far the ablest 
answer to the philosophic need thus understood, 
clearness and unity being there carried each to the 
farthest point compatible with the other's existence. 

VII 

And now comes the question as to the worth of 
such an achievement. How much better off is the 
philosopher when he has got his system than he was 
before it? As a mere phenomenal system it stands 
between two fires. On the one hand the unbridled 
craver of unity scorns it, as being incompletely 
rational, still to a great extent an empirical sand- 
heap; whilst on the other the practical man de- 
spises its empty and abstract barrenness. All it 
says is that the elements of the world are such and 
such and that each is identical with itself wherever 
found; but the question: Where is it found? (which 
is for the practical man the all-important question 
about each element) he is left to answer by his own 

121 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AKD REVIEWS £1879] 

wit. Which, of all the essences, shall here and now 
be held the essence of this concrete thing, the 
fundamental philosophy never attempts to decide. 
We seem thns led to the conclusion that a system 
of categories is, on the one hand, the only possible 
philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable 
and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the 
truth. It is a monstrous abridgment of things which 
like all abridgments is got by the absolute loss and 
casting out of real matter. This is why so few hu- 
man beings truly care for Philosophy. The particu- 
lar determinations which she ignores are the real 
matter exciting other aesthetic and practical needs, 
quite as potent and authoritative as hers. What 
does the moral enthusiast care for philosophical 
ethics? Why does the Mstlxetik of every German 
philosopher appear to the artist like the abomina- 
tion of desolation? What these men need is a par- 
ticular counsel, and no barren, universal truism. 

"Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie 
Und grim des Lebens goldner Baum." 

The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, 
will take nothing as an equivalent for Life but the 
fulness of living itself. Since the essences of things 
are as a matter of fact spread out and disseminated 
through the whole extent of time and space, it is in 
their spread-outness and alternation that he will 
enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash and 
dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by an 
occasional bath in the eternal spring, or fortify 
himself by a daily look at the immutable Matures. 

122 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the 
region; he will never carry the philosophic yoke 
upon his shoulders, and when tired of the gray 
monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness 
of her results, will always escape gleefully into 
the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete 
world. 

So our study turns back here to its beginning. 
We started by calling every concept a teleological 
instrument (supra, p. 86). Xo concept can be a 
valid substitute for a concrete reality except with 
reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. 
The interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of 
identification, is but one of a thousand human pur- 
poses. When others rear their heads it must pack 
up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. 
The exaggerated dignity and value that philoso- 
phers have claimed for their solutions is thus 
greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic 
conception need have is simplicity, and a simple 
conception is an equivalent for the world only so 
far as the world is simple; the world meanwhile, 
whatever simplicity it may harbour, being also a 
mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity re- 
mains, however, and enough urgency in our craving 
to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the 
most invincible and authoritative of human im- 
pulses. All ages have their intellectual populace. 
That of our own day prides itself particularly on 
its love of Science and Facts and its contempt for 
all metaphysics. Just weaned from the Sunday- 

123 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 3 

school nurture of its early years, with the taste of 
the catechism still in its mouth, it is perhaps not 
surprising that its palate should lack discrimina- 
tion and fail to recognise how much of ontology 
is contained in the "Nature," "Force" and "Neces- 
sary Law," how much mysticism in the "Awe," 
"Progress" and "Loyalty to Truth," or whatever 
the other phrases may be with which it sweetens 
its rather meagre fare of fragmentary physiology 
and physics. But its own inconsistency should 
teach it that the eradication of music, painting 
and poetry, games of chance and skill, manly 
sports and all other aesthetic energies from human 
life, would be an easy task compared with that 
suppression of Metaphysics which it aspires to ac- 
complish. Metaphysics of some sort there must be. 
The only alternative is between the good Meta- 
physics of clear-headed Philosophy and the trashy 
Metaphysics of vulgar Positivism. Metaphysics, 
the quest of the last clear elements of things, is 
but another name for thought which seeks thorough 
self -consistency ; and so long as men must think at 
all, some will be found willing to forsake all else to 
follow that ideal. 

VIII 

Suppose then the goal attained. Suppose we have 
at last a Metaphysics in which clearness and unity 
join friendly hands. Whether it be over a system 
of interlocked elements, or over a substance, or 
over such a simple fact as "phenomenon" or "rep- 

124 



[ 187Q ] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

resentation," need not trouble us now. For the 
discussion which follows we will call the result the 
metaphysical Datum and leave its composite or 
simple nature uncertain. Whichever it be, and 
however limited as we have seen be the sphere of 
its utility, it satisfies, if no other need, at least the 
need of rationality. But now I ask : Can that which 
is the ground of rationality in all else be itself 
properly called rational? It would seem at first 
sight that in the sense of the word we have hitherto 
alone considered, it might. One is tempted at any 
rate to say that, since the craving for rationality 
in a theoretic or logical sense consists in the identi- 
fication of one thing with all other outstanding 
things, a unique datum which left nothing else out- 
standing would leave no play for further rational 
demand, and might thus be said to quench that de- 
mand or to be rational in se. Xo otherness being 
left to annoy the minds we should sit down at peace. 

In other words, just as the theoretic tranquillity 
of the boor results from his spinning no further 
considerations about his chaotic universe which 
may prevent him from going about his practical 
affairs; so any brute datum whatever (provided it 
were simple and clear) ought to banish mystery from 
the Universe of the philosopher and confer perfect 
theoretic peace, inasmuch as there would then be for 
him absolutely no further considerations to spin. 

This in fact is what some persons think. Profes- 
sor Bain says: "A difficulty is solved, a mystery 
unriddled, when it can be shown to resemble some- 

125 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1879 ^ 

thing else; to be an example of a fact already 
known. Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may 
be apparent contradiction: the resolution of the 
mystery is found in assimilation, identity, fra- 
ternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as 
assimilation can go, so far as likeness holds, there 
is an end to explanation; there is an end to what 
the mind can do, or can intelligently desire. . . . 
The path of science as exhibited in modern ages, is 
towards generality, wider and wider, until we reach 
the highest, the widest laws of every department 
of things; there explanation is finished, mystery 
ends, perfect vision is gained." 

But unfortunately this first answer will not hold. 
Whether for good or evil, it is an empirical fact 
that the mind is so wedded to the process of seeing 
an other beside every item of its experience, that 
when the notion of an absolute datum which is all 
is presented to it, it goes through its usual pro- 
cedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as 
if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In 
short, it spins for itself the further positive con- 
sideration of a Nonentity enveloping the Being of 
its datum ; and as that leads to no issue on the fur- 
ther side, back recoils the thought in a circle 
towards its datum again. But there is no logical 
identity, no natural bridge between nonentity and 
this particular datum, and the thought stands oscil- 
lating to and fro, wondering "Why was there any- 
thing but nonentity? Why just this universal 
datum and not another? Why anything at all?" 

126 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, 
Professor Bain's words are so untrue that in re- 
flecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the 
manifold into a single totality has been most suc- 
cessful, when the conception of the universe as a fait 
unique (in D'Alembert's words) is nearest its per- 
fection, that the craving for further explanation, 
the ontological Oau^a^scv arises in its extremest 
pungency. 

As Schopenhauer says, "The uneasiness which 
keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in mo- 
tion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of 
this world is just as possible as its existence". 1 

The notion of Nonentity may thus be called the 
parent of the philosophic craving in its subtlest and 
profoundest sense. Absolute existence is absolute 
mystery. Although selbststandig, it is not selbstver- 
standlich; for its relations with the Nothing remain 
unmediated to our understanding. One philos- 
opher only, so far as I know, has pretended to throw 
a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying 
to show that Nonentity and Being as actually de- 
termined are linked together by a series of succes- 
sive identities, binds the whole of possible thought 
into an adamantine unity with no conceivable outly- 
ing notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of 
the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked 
motion constitutes the feeling of rationality, he 
must be held, if he has succeeded, to have eternally 
and absolutely quenched all its logical demands. 

1 Welt als While da, 3 Auflage, I., p. 189. 

127 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS [1879] 

But for those who, like most of us, deem Hegel's 
heroic effort to have failed, nought remains but to 
confess that when all has been unified to its supreme 
degree (Professor Bain to the contrary notwith- 
standing), the notions of a Nonentity, or of a pos- 
sible Other than the actual, may still haunt our 
imagination and prey upon the ultimate data of our 
system. The bottom of Being is left logically 
opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the 
word, something which we simply come upon and 
find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should 
pause and wonder as little as possible. In this con- 
fession lies the lasting truth of Empiricism, and in 
it Empiricism and imaginative Faith join hands. 
The logical attitude of both is identical, they both 
say there is a plus ultra beyond all we know, a womb 
of unimagined other possibility. They only differ 
in their sentimental temper : Empiricism says, "Into 
the plus ultra you have no right to carry your an- 
thropomorphic affirmations" ; Faith says, "You have 
no right to extend to it your denials". The mere 
ontologic emotion of wonder, of mystery, has in 
some minds such a tinge of the rapture of sublimity, 
that for this aesthetic reason alone, it will be diffi- 
cult for any philosophic system completely to exor- 
cise it. 

In truth, the philosopher's logical tranquillity is 
after all in essence no other than the boor's. Their 
difference regards only the point at which each 
refuses to let further considerations upset the ab- 
soluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does 

128 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

so immediately, and is therefore liable at any mo- 
ment to the ravages of many kinds of confusion and 
doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity 
has been reached, and is therefore warranted against 
the inroads of those considerations — but only practi- 
cally, not essentially, secure from the blighting 
breath of the ultimate "Why?" Positivism takes a 
middle ground, and with a certain consciousness of 
the beyond, abruptly refuses by an inhibitory action 
of the will to think any further, stamps the ground 
and says, "Physics, I espouse thee! for better or 
worse, be thou my absolute !" 

The Absolute is what has not yet been tran- 
scended, criticised or made relative. So far from 
being something quintessential and unattainable as 
is so often pretended, it is practically the most fa- 
miliar thing in life. Every thought is absolute to 
us at the moment of conceiving it or acting upon it. 
It only becomes relative in the light of further re- 
flection. This may make it flicker and grow pale — 
the notion of nonentity may blow in from the infinite 
and extinguish the theoretic rationality of a univer- 
sal datum. As regards this latter, absoluteness and 
rationality are in fact convertible terms. And the 
chief effort of the rationalising philosopher must be 
to gain an absoluteness for his datum which shall be 
stable in the maximum degree, or as far as possible 
removed from exposure to those further considera- 
tions by which we saw that the vulgar Weltan- 
schauung may so promptly be upset. I shall hence- 
forward call the further considerations which may 

129 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS [ 1879 ^ 

supervene and make relative or derationalise a mass 
of thought, the reductive of that thought. The re- 
ductive of absolute being is thus nonentity , or the 
notion of an aliter possibile which it involves. The 
reductive of an absolute physics is the thought that 
all material facts are representations in a mind. 
The reductive of absolute time, space, causality, 
atoms, &c, are the so-called antinomies which arise 
as soon as we think fully out the thoughts we have 
begun. The reductive of absolute knowledge is the 
constant potentiality of doubt, the notion that the 
next thought may always correct the present one 
— resulting in the notion that a noumenal world is 
there mocking the one we think we know. What- 
ever we think, some reductive seems in strict theo- 
retic legitimacy always imminently hovering over 
our thought ready to blight it. Doubleness dis- 
missed at the front door re-enters in the rear and 
spoils the rationality of the simple datum we flat- 
tered ourselves we had attained. Theoretically the 
task of the philosopher, if he cannot reconcile the 
datum with the reductive by the way of identifica- 
tion a la Hegel, is to exorcise the reductive so that 
the datum may hold up its head again and know no 
fear. Professor Bain would no doubt say that non- 
entity was a pseud-idea not derived from experience 
and therefore meaningless, and so exorcise that re- 
ductive. 1 The antinomies may be exorcised by the 

1 The author of A Candid Examination of Theism (Triibner, 
1878) exercises Nonentity by the notion of the all-excluding in- 
finitude of Existence, — whether reasonably or not I refrain 

130 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

distinction between potentiality and actuality. 1 The 
ordinary half educated materialist comforts him- 
self against idealists by the notion that, after all, 
thought is such an obscure mystical form of exist- 
ence that it is almost as bad as no existence at all, 
and need not be seriously taken into account by a 
sensible man. 

If nothing else could be conceived than thoughts 
or fancies, these would be credited with the maxi- 
mum of reality. Their reductive is the belief in an 
objective reality of which they are but copies. 
When this belief takes the form of the affirmation of 
a noumenal world contrasted with all possible 
thought, and therefore playing no other part than 
that of reductive pure and simple, — to discover the 
formula of exorcism becomes, and has been recog- 
nized ever since Kant to be, one of the principal 
tasks of philosophy rationally understood. 

The reductive used by nominalists to discredit 
the self -identity of the same attribute in different 
phenomena is the notion of a still higher degree of 
identity. We easily exorcise this reductive by chal- 
lenging them to show what the higher degree of 
sameness can possibly contain which is not already 
in the lower. 

The notion of Nonentity is not only a reductive ; 
it can assume upon occasion an exorcising function. 

from deciding. The last chapter of this work (published a 
year after the present text was written) is on "the final 
Mystery of Things," and expresses in striking language much 
that I have said. 

1 See Kenouvier : Premier Essai. 

131 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 ^ 

If, for example, a man's ordinary mundane con- 
sciousness feels staggered at the improbability of 
an immaterial thinking-principle being the source 
of all things, Nonentity comes in and says, "Con- 
trasted with me (that is, considered simply as 
existent) one principle is as probable as another". 
If the same mundane consciousness recoils at the 
notion of providence towards individuals or individ- 
ual immortality as involving, the one too infinite a 
subdivision of the divine attention, the other a too 
infinite accumulation of population in the heavens, 
Nonentity says, "As compared with me all quanti- 
ties are one : the wonder is all there when God has 
found it worth His while to guard or save a single 
soul". 

. But if the philosopher fails to find a satisfac- 
tory formula of exorcism for his datum, the only 
thing he can do is to "blink" the reductive at a cer- 
tain point, assume the Given as his necessary ulti- 
mate, and proceed to a life whether of contempla- 
tion or of action based on that. There is no doubt 
this half wilful act of arrest, this acting on an 
opaque necessity, is accompanied by a certain pleas- 
ure. See the reverence of Carlyle for brute fact: 
"There is an infinite significance in Fact." "Neces- 
sity," says a German philosopher, 1 and he means not 
rational but simply given necessity, "is the last and 
highest point that we can reach in a rational con- 
ception of the world. ... It is not only the in- 
terest of ultimate and definitive knowledge, but also 

1 Diihring: Cursus der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1875, p. 35. 

132 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY 

that of the feelings, to find a last repose and an 
ideal equilibrium, in an uttermost datum which can 
simply not be other than it is." 

Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their 
theism, God's fiat being in physics and morals such 
an uttermost datum. Such also is the attitude of 
all hard-minded analysts and Verstandesmenschen. 
Renouvier and Hodgson, the two foremost con- 
temporary philosophers, promptly say that of ex- 
perience as a whole no account can be given, but do 
not seek to soften the abruptness of the confession 
or reconcile us with our impotence. 

Such mediating attempts may be made by more 
mystical minds. The peace of rationality may be 
sought through ecstacy when logic fails. To re- 
ligious persons of every shade of doctrine moments 
come when the world as it is seems so divinely 
orderly, and the acceptance of it by the heart so 
rapturously complete, that intellectual questions 
vanish, nay the intellect itself is hushed to sleep — 
as Wordsworth says, "Thought is not, in enjoyment 
it expires". Ontological emotion so fills the soul 
that oncological speculation can no longer overlap 
it and put her girdle of interrogation-marks around 
existence. Even the least religious of men must 
have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt 
Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some trans- 
parent summer morning, that "Swiftly arose and 
spread around him the peace and knowledge that 
pass all the argument of the earth". At such mo- 
ments of energetic living we feel as if there were 

133 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS f 1879 ^ 

something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in 
theoretic grubbing and brooding. To feel "I am the 
truth" is to abolish the opposition between knowing 
and being. 

Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate 
irrationality which the head ascertains, the erection 
of its procedure into a systematised method would 
be a philosophic achievement of first-rate impor- 
tance. As used by mystics hitherto it has lacked 
universality, being available for few persons and 
at few times, and even in these being apt to be fol- 
lowed by fits of "reaction" and "dryness"; but it 
may nevertheless be the forerunner of what will ulti- 
mately prove a true method. If all men could per- 
manently say with Jacobi, "In my heart there is 
light," though they should for ever fail to give an 
articulate account of it, existence would really be 
rationalised. 1 

But if men should ever all agree that the mystical 

*A curious recent contribution to the construction of a uni- 
versal mystical method is contained in the Ancesthetic Revela- 
tion by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874). The author, 
who is a writer abounding in verbal felicities, thinks we may 
all grasp the secret of Being if we only intoxicate ourselves 
often enough with laughing-gas. "There is in the instant of 
recall from the anaesthetic stupor a moment in which the genius 
of being is revealed. . . . Patients try to speak of it but in- 
variably fail in a lost mood of introspection. . . . But most will 
accept this as the central point of the illumination that sanity 
is not the basic quality of intelligence, . . . but that only in 
sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life 
is realised outside of sanity altogether. It is the instant con- 
trast of this tasteless water of souls with formal thought as 
we come to that leaves the patient in an astonishment that the 
awful mystery of life is at last but a homely and common 

134 



[1879] SENTIMENT OF KATIONALITY 

method is a subterfuge without logical pertinency, 
a plaster, but no cure, that the Hegelian method is 
fallacious, that the idea of Nonentity can therefore 
neither be exorcised nor identified, Empiricism will 
be the ultimate philosophy. Existence will be a 
brute Fact to which as a whole the emotion of onto- 
logic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain 
eternally unsatisfied. This wonderfulness or mys- 
teriousness will then be an essential attribute of the 
nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasiz- 
ing of it will always continue to be an ingredient in 
the philosophic industry of the race. Every genera- 
tion will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Faust or 
its Sartor Resartics. 

With this we seem to have exhausted all the pos- 
sibilities of purely theoretic rationality. But we 
saw at the outset that when subjectively considered 
rationality can only be defined as perfectly unim- 
peded mental function. Impediments which arise 
in the purely theoretic sphere might perhaps be 
avoided if the stream of mental action should leave 

thing. ... To minds of sanguine imagination there will be a 
sadness in the tenor of the mystery, as if the key-note of the 
universe were low — for no poetry, no emotion known to the 
normal sanity of man, can furnish a hint of its primaeval pres- 
tige, and its ail-but appalling solemnity ; but for such as have 
felt sadly the instability of temporal things there is a comfort 
of serenity and ancient peace; while for the resolved and im- 
perious spirit there are majesty and supremacy unspeakable." 
The logical characteristic of this state is said to be "an apodal 
sufficiency — to which sufficiency a wonder or fear of why it is 
sufficient cannot pertain and could be attributed only as an 
impossible disease or lack. . . . The disease of Metaphysics 
vanishes in the fading of the question and not in the coming of 
an answer." 

135 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS E 1879 l 

that sphere betimes and pass into the practical. 
The structural unit of mind is in these days, deemed 
to be a triad, beginning with a sensible impression, 
ending with a motion, and having a feeling of 
greater or less length in the middle. Perhaps the s 
whole difficulty of attaining theoretic rationality is 
due to the fact that the very quest violates the 
nature of our intelligence, and that a passage of the 
mental function into the third stage before the 
second has come to an end in the cul de sac of its 
contemplation, would revive the energy of motion 
and keep alive the sense of ease and freedom which 
is its psychic counterpart. We must therefore in- 
quire what constitutes the feeling of rationality in 
its practical aspect; but that must be done at 
another time and in another place. 

Note. — This article is the first chapter of a psychological 
work on the motives which lead men to philosophise. It deals 
with the purely theoretic or logical impulse. Other chapters 
treat of practical and emotional motives and in the conclusion 
an attempt is made to use the motives as tests of the sound- 
ness of different philosophies. 



136 



XI 

CLIFFOKD'S "LECTURES AND 

ESSAYS" 1 

[1879] 

It is impossible to read these volumes without 
taking an even greater interest in the human charac- 
ter they reveal than in the matters of which they 
treat. The author was cut down last March at the 
age of thirty-three. Many who have read hastily 
and at long intervals the essays here gathered to- 
gether may have caught the impression of a genius 
too iconoclastic to be sympathetic, too fond of 
paradoxical statement to be wise, too eager for 
battle to be fair; but the massive effect of all the 
essays taken together and combined with the per- 
sonal account of Clifford in the introduction strongly 
modifies this feeling. We see a man profuse of gifts 
of body and mind, of "boundless human interests 
and sympathies/' so intensely social that "personal 
enmity was to him a thing impossible" ; of a genius 
in mathematics so original that we have heard an 

C 1 Review of Lectures and Essays, and Seeing and Thinking, 
by W. K. Clifford, London and New York, 1879. Reprinted 
from Nation, 1879, 29, 312-313. Clifford's views on "The 
Ethics of Belief" most perfectly embodied that vigorous posi- 
tivism to which James opposed his "Will-to-Believe" doc- 
trine. See references to Clifford in Will to Believe (1897) 
passim. Ed.] 

137 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1879 J 

authority than whom none could be more compe- 
tent say that he might have rivalled the fame of 
Newton had he lived; but, on the other hand, en- 
dowed with that sense for the color and human 
expression of things which poets have and mathe- 
maticians too often lack, and which irradiates every 
page he writes with humor and fancy ; of insatiable 
curiosity, but as eager to give all he gained as to 
receive it ; possessed of such reckless animal spirits 
that we find him now hanging by his toes on the 
crossbars of a church-steeple weather-cock, now per- 
forming the almost incredible feat of writing his 
articles on the "Unseen Universe" and on Virchow's 
address each in a single night — we see all this, and 
we feel that, as Mr. Pollock says, his printed work 
must be a very slender representative of all he 
was to those who knew him, and that the incom- 
municable and indescribable thing called genius, 
das Damonische, when it exists in a man as it did 
in him, transcends all his specific performances, 
and, "lightening the air his friends breathe," may 
very w^ell justify them in making claims which to 
the distant reader sound exorbitant. 

But even the distant reader must allow that Clif- 
ford's mental personality belonged to the highest 
possible type, to say no more. The union of the 
mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, 
passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. 
And if in these modern days we are to look for 
any prophet or saviour who shall influence our feel- 
ings towards the universe as the founders and re- 

138 



[1879] CLIFFORD'S "LECTURES" 

newers of past religions have influenced the minds 
of our fathers, that prophet, if he ever come, must, 
like Clifford, be no mere sentimental worshipper of 
science, but an expert in her ways. And he must 
have what Clifford had in so extraordinary a de- 
gree — that lavishly generous confidence in the 
worthiness of average human nature to be told all 
truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an in- 
spiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many. 
But why, with all of Clifford's powers, does the 
result appear so small? Why do these lectures seem 
to the reader almost funny in the inadequacy with 
which they shadow forth anything fit to form a 
"creed" for modern life? Why, indeed, to put the 
case more broadly, would an almost impossible 
cumulation of faculties in a single man — Clifford's 
scientific faith and skill, a poetic craft equal to his 
poetic feeling, a faculty for public affairs which he 
never possessed, a genius for familiar oratory, an 
expansive communicativeness, and a humanity 
greater than his — why would all these aptitudes to- 
gether certainly fail now to give their possessor 
that altogether incalculable sort of power over the 
mind of his generation which the prophets of the 
past have held? The answer to these questions is 
short enough. Our modern mind is nothing if not 
critical — the craving for consistency has entered 
into its soul, and nothing will deeply move it but a 
synthesis of things which is radically reasoned out. 
No array of separate gifts, with this synthesis still 
unachieved, will make a prophet now. Ever some 

139 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1879 ] 

vital factor of our mental life will rebel and refuse 
to be dragged the same way with the rest. The 
miraculous achievement, the achievement upon 
which we are all waiting for our faculties to burst 
into movement like mill-wheels at the touch of a 
torrent, must be a metaphysical achievement, the 
greatest of all time — the demonstration, namely, 
that all our different motives, rightly interpreted, 
pull one way. Now our Science tells our Faith 
that she is shameful, and our Hopes that they are 
dupes ; our Keverence for truth leads to conclusions 
that make all reverence a falsehood ; our new Good, 
survival of our tribe, is the one thing certain to 
perish with our planet; our Freedom annuls our 
opportunities for lofty deeds ; our Equality with our 
brethren quenches all tendency to be proud of their 
brotherhood ; our Art, instead of intimating divine 
secrets, becomes an intellectual sensuality, reveal- 
ing no secrets but those of our nervous systems ; our 
craving for personal recognition at the heart of 
things is flatly contradicted by our persuasion that 
we none of us possess any independent personality 
at all ; in short, if we wish to keep in action, we have 
no resource but to clutch some one thing out of the 
chaos to serve as our hobby, and trust to our native 
blindness and mere animal spirits to make us in- 
different to the loss of all the rest. Can the synthe- 
sis and reconciliation come? It would be as rash to 
despair of it as to swear to it in advance. But when 
it does come, whatever its specific character may be, 
it will necessarily have to be of the theoretic order, 

140 



[1879] CLIFFORD'S "LECTURES" 

a result of deeper philosophic analysis and discrimi- 
nation than has yet been made. He who makes it 
will indeed be a leader of his time ; for then, in our 
author's words, will there be a "universe fresh born, 
a new heaven, a new earth, a new elysium open to 
our eager feet." Then, indeed, will la verite be toute 
pour touSy in the phrase which the editors have 
placed as an epigraph on the title-page of these lec- 
tures. Then we can all re-echo with Clifford : 

"If a thing is true, let us all believe it, rich and poor, 
men, women, and children. If a thing is untrue, let us 
all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women, and chil- 
dren. Truth is a thing to be shouted from the house- 
tops, not to be whispered over lose-water after dinner, 
when the ladies are gone away. . . ." 

But what sort of a figure does Clifford's own phi- 
losophy make when treated in this fashion? Surely 
there never was an intenser illustration than is 
spread out in these pages of the chaotic state of our 
contemporary thinking, or a creed on the whole less 
fit to be proclaimed to the people as the matured 
and clarified result of scientific thought. There are, 
of course, exquisitely simple and vivid statements 
of particular physical theories. It is hard to imag- 
ine better reading to inflame a boy with thirst for 
physics than the lecture on "Atoms,':' and the 
articles entitled "The Unseen Universe" and "The 
First and Last Catastrophe." The one on "Boun- 
daries" in the smaller volume is marvellously clear ; 
and the chapters on the "Philosophy of the Pure 
Sciences" in the larger form as luminous an in- 

141 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS f 1879 l 

troduction to mathematical philosophy as was ever 
written. Image after image of perfect felicity pur- 
sue each other through a style of which the only 
fault is too great ease and too many Saxon words 
for our degenerate ears. But in the fundamental 
ideas what mere subjective capriciousness ! A scep- 
ticism which fears to call the axioms of geometry 
true, but which takes no umbrage at the self-contra- 
dictions of continuity and infinite division in space 
and time; a scrupulousness which speaks with all 
the unction of the theological vocabulary of the 
"guilt" and "sin" of believing even the truth before 
it has been scientifically demonstrated, but which 
fears not to lay down as dogmas, to be believed 
by all, such pure conceptions of the possible as the 
existence of primordial atoms of "mind-stuff" which 
are the true things in se, the impotence of feeling 
to influence action, and the rigorous fatality of 
human acts. Then as to Ethics : Clifford's great dis- 
covery is that what is objectively goody as distin- 
guished from what is merely subjectively pleasant, 
is what conduces to the survival of the tribe. 
Loyalty to truth and all other virtues draw their 
nobility from being means to this effect. And the 
symbolic figure of the tribe is invoked as a substi- 
tute for superhuman deities, "a grander and nobler 
figure" than theirs, the figure of "Him who made 
all gods and shall unmake them" : 

"A presence in which one's own poor personality is 
shrivelled into nothingness, . . . which in moments of 
utter sincerity, when a man has bared his own soul be- 

142 



[1879] CLIFFORD'S "LECTURES" 

fore the immensities and the eternities, arises within 
him and says, as plainly as words can say, 'I am with 
thee, and I am greater than thou/ Many names of gods, 
of many shapes, have men given to this presence ; seek- 
ing by names and pictures to know more clearly and to 
remember more continually the guide and the helper of 
men. No such comradeship with the great Companion 
shall have anything but reverence from me. . . . From 
the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depth of 
every soul, the face of our father Man looks out upon us 
with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says: 
'Before Jehovah was, I am !' " 

Surely splendid rhetoric; but observe the circle 
in the logic : "We must show piety to our race be- 
cause our race is worthy" means, simply stated, 
that we must help it to survive because it can sur- 
vive. But if it can survive, it will anyhow, and 
needs none of our help. Whilst, if it needs our help ? 
it can't survive per se, and lacking, therefore, those 
attributes which we learn to call objectively good, 
can have no claim on our sympathy. In any case we 
may turn our backs upon it. It is beside the mark 
to say, "As a matter of fact we can't turn our backs ; 
instinct forbids." Other instincts bid; arid the 
whole use of open-eyed philosophy is to teach us 
how we ought to decide when our blind instincts 
clash. Professor Clifford's fine organ-music, like 
the bands and torches of our political campaigns, 
must be meant for our nerves rather than for our 
reason. The entire modern deification of survival 
per se, survival returning into itself, survival naked 
and abstract, with the denial of any substantive ex- 

143 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1879 ] 

cellence in what survives, except the capacity for 
more survival still, is surely the strangest intellect- 
ual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to 
another. 

Take, again, Clifford's notion that high action 
means free action. Seating himself firmly on this 
high horse, he immediately proceeds with the ut- 
most fury to chop off its legs. For he first defines 
free action as action from within, and then describes 
action from within as that whose immediate ante- 
cedents are molecular, and not the massive motions 
of distant bodies. Think of firing the popular heart 
for virtue by promulgating, as the only true and 
scientifically warranted moral law, the formula: 
"So act that all thy deeds have molecular, not mas- 
sive, antecedents"! 

Clifford's great metaphysical theory of units of 
mind-stuff forming things in themselves, and ap- 
pearing to each other as molecules of matter, so far 
from clearing up our ideas makes confusion worse 
confounded for the present. It would really require 
a fourth or a fifth dimension of space to make an 
intelligible diagram of the relations between the 
thing, the thought of the thing, and the brain proc- 
ess subserving the thought, which this theory neces- 
sitates. But, as the author himself says, "the ques- 
tion is one in which it is peculiarly difficult to 
make out precisely what another man means, and 
even what one means one's self." Only we think a 
clearer grasp of this theory might have dispos- 
sessed from Clifford's mind that other theory, that 

144 



[1879] CLIFFORD'S "LECTURES" 

our feelings are powerless to influence our deeds. 
The theory says that the atoms of inind-stuff, when 
they fortuitously coalesce in certain ways, form a 
consciousness, and in other ways do not. Now, 
noting that the conscious combinations tend the 
more to survive as their consciousness is more de- 
veloped, what is more natural than to conclude that 
the consciousness as such aids them by its pres- 
ence, and has a real utility, making self-preserva- 
tion the end for which it actively works, by rein- 
forcing all actions and feelings which lead thereto, 
and checking all the rest? But this conclusion 
would oblige us to ascribe to it just that causal 
efficacy which Clifford denies. 

Far be it from our thought to cast a stigma on 
any of these beliefs. The beliefs which have moved 
the world have always been directed upon some 
material content, and have been quite indifferent to 
logic. When the true prophet arises the right will 
be sifted from the wrong in Clifford's doctrines, and 
in those of all of us. Till then we should all be 
left free to mix our mental porridge as we please. 
What we complain of is that Clifford should have 
been willing, with his ideas still in their Halolieit 
and unshapeliness, to use the conjuring spell of the 
name of Science, and to harp on Reverence for Truth 
as means whereby to force them on the minds of 
simple public listeners, and so still more unsettle 
what is already too perplexed. Splintered ends, 
broken threads, broken lights, and, at last, broken 
hearts and broken life ! So ends this bright romance ! 

145 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1879 3 

But louder and more joyously than any of us would 
its generous hero have sung : 

"Wo iminer miide Fechter 
Sinken im muthigen Strauss, 
Es kommen neue Geschlechter 
Und kampfen es ehrlich aus." 



U<5 



XII 

SPENCEB'S "DATA OF ETHICS" 1 

[1879] 

The facts of evolution have crowded upon the 
thinking world so fast within the last few years that 
their philosophy has fared rather hard. Chaotic 
cohorts of outlandish associates, the polyp's ten- 
tacles, the throat of the pitcher-plant, the nest of 
the bower-bird, the illuminated hind-quarters of the 
baboon, and the manners and customs of the Dyaks 
and Andamanese, have swept like a deluge into the 
decent gardens in which, with her disciples, refined 
Philosophy was wont to pace, and have left but 
little of their human and academic scenery erect. 
Many of the previous occupants, though broken- 
hearted at the desecration, have submitted, in a sort 
of pessimistic despair, to the barbarian invaders. 
Others, temporarily routed, are uncertain what to 
do. The victors meanwhile, intoxicated with suc- 
cess, assume, for the most part, that Philosophy her- 
self is dead, or that, if she still has vitality enough 
left to continue propounding any of her silly conun- 
drums, she will be shamed to silence, as now one, 
now another, of the conquering ragged regiment 

[ x Selections from a review of Spencer's Data of Ethics, 1879, 
printed in Nation, 1879, 29, 178-179. Ed.] 

147 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1879 J 

stands forth to face her down. We are the truth 
and the whole truth, they cry. Emotion, in short, 
has paralyzed reflection on both sides, as it always 
does in sudden revolutions. But when the new- 
comers grow accustomed to their situation, and the 
original possessors get better acquainted with their 
strange bedfellows, things will settle down on very 
much the old basis. 



Whereas to all other revolutionary moralists the 
status belli has received a new consecration from the 
new ideas; whereas in Germany especially the 
"struggle for existence" has been made the bap- 
tismal formula for the most cynical assertions of 
brute egoism; with Mr. Spencer the same theories 
have bred an almost Quakerish humanitarianism 
and regard for peace. Frequently in these pages 
does his indignation at the ruling powers of Britain 
burst forth, for their policy of conquest over lower 
races. Might, in his eyes, would hardly seem to be 
right, even when evolution is carried on by its 
means. And this brings us to the only criticism we 
care to make. We can never on evolutionist princi- 
ples altogether bar out personal bias, or the sub- 
jective method, from the construction of the ethical 
standard of right, however fatalistic we may be. 
For if what is right means what succeeds, however 
fatally doomed to succeed that thing may be, it yet 
succeeds through the determinate acts of determin- 
ate individuals ; and until it has been revealed what 

148 



[1879] SPENCER'S "DATA OF ETHICS" 

shall succeed, we are all free to "go in" for our pref- 
erences and try to make them right by making them 
victorious. Now, it may be strictly true that, as 
Mr. Spencer says, no pref erence of ours possibly can 
succeed in the long run, unless, with its other con- 
tents, it be also a preference for peace, justice, and 
sympathy. But we still are free to decide when to 
settle down on the equitable and peaceful basis. A 
postponement of fifty years may wipe the Sioux and 
Zulus out of the game, and with them the type of 
character which they represent. Evolutionists must 
not forget that we all have five fingers merely be- 
cause the first vertebrate above the fishes happened 
to have that number. He owed his prodigious suc- 
cess in founding a line of descent to some entirely 
other quality — we know not which as yet — but the 
inessential ^.\e fingers were taken in tow and pre- 
served to the present day. So of minor moral 
points; we have to decide which of them the peace 
and sympathy shall take in tow and carry on to 
triumph. What kind of fellows shall we be willing 
to be peaceful with, and whose sympathy shall we 
enjoy? An unlettered workingman of the writer's 
acquaintance once made the profound remark: 
"There's very little difference betwixt one man and 
another, but what little there is is very important." 
Shall we settle down to peaceful competition 
already now with the Chinese? shall our messmates 
in the millennial equilibrium be of the fat-minded 
Esquimaux type? or shall we put up with some gen- 
erations more of status belli in order to get a good 

149 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1879 J 

congenial working majority of artists, metaphysi- 
cians, wits, and yearners after the ineffable with 
whom we may live contented? According to evolu- 
tion each human type and exemplar of character 
has small beginnings like everything else. The 
"best" is that which has the biggest endings. Mine 
may have these if I get ahead and violently crush 
yours out in time; yours, if I let the precious occa- 
sion slip and you outgrow and suppress me. For 
the conditions which once produced me, just as I 
am, may never recur again. 

Mr. Spencer has forgotten to consider this inevit- 
able field of warring antipathies, in which each must 
just fight doggedly and hope the event may prove 
him right. Or probably he has not so much forgot- 
ten as contemned it in his vast dream of universal 
fatalism. 



150 



XIII 
THE FEELING OF EFFOBT x 

[1880] 

La locomotion animale n'a mil rapport direct avec ce 
qu'on appelle velonte\ . . . L'effort, le nisus, ne doit 
pas etre fixe dans le rapport de la volition avec l'acte 
propre du mobile materiel. . . . L'effort, dans l'accep- 
tion rationnelle de ce mot, est le rapport de la represen- 
tation avec elle-meme. Kenouvier. 

I propose in the following pages to offer a scheme 
of the physiology and psychology of volition, more 
completely worked out and satisfactory than any I 
have yet met with. The matter is a little intricate, 
and I shall have to ask the reader to bear patiently 
a good deal of detail for the sake of the importance 
of the result. 

That we have a feeling of effort there can be no 
doubt. Popular language has sufficiently conse- 
crated the fact by the institution of the word effort, 
and its synonyms exertion, striving, straining. The 
difference between a simply passive sensation, and 

I I Reprinted from the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston 
Society of Natural History, Boston, 1880, pp. 32. It was sum- 
marized by the Editor of Mind, 1880, 5, p. 582. It constitutes 
the author's earliest discussions of the will, the "feeling of in- 
nervation," ideo-motor action, and the psychology of free-will. 
Pp. 163-174 were reprinted in the Principles of Psychology, 1890, 
II, pp. 503-511. But in the main Chapter XXVI of the Prin- 
ciples is a rewriting rather than a reprinting of the present 
article. Ed.j 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 188 °1 

one in which the elements of volition and attention 
are found, has also been recorded by popular speech 
in the difference between such verbs as to see and to 
look; to hear and to listen; to smell and to scent; 
to feel and to touch. Effort, attention, and volition 
are, in fact, similar elements of Feeling differing all 
in the same generic manner from its receptive, or 
simply sensational elements ; and forming the active 
as distinguished from the passive parts of our 
mental nature. This distinction is styled by Bain 
the most vital one within the sphere of mind; and 
at all times psychologists of the a priori school have 
emphasized the utter opposition between our con- 
sciousness of spontaneity or outgoing energy, and 
the consciousness of any mere impression whatever. 
Fully admitting the feelings of active energy as 
mental facts, our question simply is of what nervous 
processes are they concomitants? As the feeling of 
effort is nowhere more coarsely and obviously pres- 
ent than in the phenomenon of muscular exertion, 
let us limit our inquiry first to that. 

I. Muscular Exertion an Afferent Feeling 

Johannes Mtiller was, so far as I know, the first 
to say 1 that the nerve-process accompanying the 
feeling of muscular exertion is the discharge from 
the motor centre into the motor nerve. The sup- 
position is a most natural and plausible one ; for if 
afferent nerve processes are felt, each in its charac- 

1 Physiologie, 1S40, Bd. ii, p. 500. 
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[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

teristic way, why should not efferent processes be 
felt by equal right, and with equally characteristic 
qualities? Accordingly we find in writers of all 
nations since Mtiller's time, repetitions implicit or 
explicit, of his suggestion. But the authors who 
have most emphatically insisted on it, and raised it 
to the position of a fundamental doctrine, are Bain, 
Hughlings Jackson and Wundt. 

Bain says: "The sensibility accompanying mus- 
cular movement coincides with the outgoing stream 
of nervous energy, and does not, as in the case of 
pure sensation, result from any influence passing 
inwards, by incarrying or sensitive nerves." 1 

Jackson writes : "Sensations, in the sense of men- 
tal states, arise, I submit, during energizing of 
motor as well as of sensory nerve processes — with 
the outgoing as well as with the ingoing current." 2 

Wundt separates the feeling of force exerted, 
from the feeling of effected movement. 3 And in 
later writings he adopts the term Innervationsgefilhl 
to designate the former in relation to its supposed 
cause, the efferent discharge. Feelings of innerva- 
tion have since then become household words in 
psychological literature. Two English writers 
only, so far as I know, Dr. Charlton Bastian and 

1 The Senses and the Intellect. 3d edition, p. 77. 

2 Clinical and Physiological Researches on the Nervous Sys- 
tem (reprinted from the Lancet, 1873), London, J. & A. 
Churchill, p. xxxiv. See also this author's very original though 
somewhat obscure paper on "Aphasia" in Brain for October, 
1879, p. 351. 

3 Beitrdge zur Theorie der Sinnesivahrnehmung, p. 420. 
Physiologische Psychologie, p. 316. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 188 °] 

Dr. Ferrier, have expressed skepticism as to the 
existence of any feelings connected with the efferent 
nervous discharge. But their arguments being im- 
perfect, and in the case of Bastian rather confusedly- 
expressed, have passed unnoticed. Lotze in Ger- 
many has also raised a skeptical voice, but has not 
backed his doubts by many arguments. 1 The noto- 
rious existence of the feeling of effort in muscular 
exertion; the fact that the efferent discharge there 
plays the principal role, and the plausibility of the 
postulate so often insisted on by Lewes that identity 
of structure involves identity of function, have all 
conspired to make us almost believe, as a matter of 
course, that motor cells when they discharge into 
motor fibres, should have their own "specific energy" 
of feeling, and that this should be no other than the 
sense of energy put forth. 

In opposition to this popular view, I maintain 
that the feeling of muscular energy put forth is a 
complex afferent sensation coming from the tense 
muscles, the strained ligaments, squeezed joints, 
fixed chest, closed glottis, contracted brow, clenched 
jaws, etc., etc. That there is over and above this 
another feeling of effort involved, I do not deny ; but 
this latter is purely moral and has nothing to do 
with the motor discharge. We shall study it at the end 
of this essay, and shall find it to be essentially iden- 
tical with the effort to remember, with the effort to 
make a decision, or to attend to a disagreeable task. 

*See his Metaphysik, 1869, p. 589. See also Revue Philo- 
sophique, t. iv, p. 359. 

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[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

First then, let us disprove the notion that there is 
any feeling connected with the motor or efferent 
nervous discharge. We may begin by asking : Why 
should there be? Even accepting Lewes's postulate 
in the abstract, what degree of "identity'' should be 
demanded between the afferent and efferent nerve 
apparatus, to insure their being both alike, "sen- 
tient"? Even to our coarse optical examination, the 
sensory and the motor cells are widely different. 
But apart from a priori postulates, and however 
strange to logic it may appear, it is a fact that the 
motor apparatus is absolutely insentient in an affer- 
ent direction, although we know that the fibres of 
the anterior root will propagate a disturbance in 
that direction as well as in the other. Why may not 
this result from a true insentiency in the motor cell, 
an insentiency which would accompany all action 
there, and characterize its normal discharges as well 
as the unnatural irritations made by the knife of the 
surgeon or the electrodes of the physiologist upon 
the motor nerve. 

Plausibility accrues to this presumption when we 
call to mind this general law: that consciousness 
seems to desert all processes where it can no longer 
be of any use. The tendency of consciousness to a 
minimum of complication is in fact a dominating 
law in Psychology. The logical law of parsimony is 
only its best-known case. We grow unconscious of 
every feeling which is useless as a sign to lead us to 
our ends, and where one sign will suffice, others drop 
out, and that one remains to function alone. We 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t!880] 

observe this in the whole history of sense per- 
ception, and in the acquisition of every art. We 
ignore which eye we see with, because a nxed 
mechanical association has been formed between 
our morions and each retinal image. Our motions 
are the ends of our seeing, our retinal images the 
signals to these ends. If each retinal image, which- 
ever it be. can suggest automatically a motion 
in the right direction, what need for us to know 
whether it be in the right eye or the left? The 
knowledge would be superfluous complication. So 
in acquiring any art or voluntary function. The 
marksman thinks only of the exact position of the 
goal, the singer only of the perfect sound, the bal- 
ancer only of the point in space whose oscillations 
he must counteract by movement. The associated 
mechanism has become so perfect in all these per- 
sons, that each variation in the thought of the end. 
is functionally correlated with the one movement 
nrted to bring the latter about. Whilst they were 
tyros, they thought of their means as well as their 
end : the marksman of the position of his gun or bow, 
or the weight of his stone, the pianist of the visible 
position of the note on the keyboard, the singer of 
Ids throat or breathing, the balancer of his feet on 
the rope, or his hand or chin under the pole. But 
little by little they succeeded in dropping all this 
supernumerary consciousness, and they became 
secure in their movements exactly in proportion as 
they did so. 

Now if we analyze the nervous mechanism of vol- 

156 



£1880] THE PEELING OF EFFORT 

untary action, we shall see that by virtue of this 
principle of parsimony in consciousness, the motor 
discharge ought to be devoid of sentience. The es- 
sentials of a voluntary movement are : 1, a prelimi- 
nary idea of the end we wish to attain ; 2, a "fiat" ; 
3, an appropriate muscular contraction; 4, the end 
felt as actually accomplished. In man, at any rate, 
it is admitted that the idea of the end and the mus- 
cular contraction were originally coupled by empir- 
ical association; that is to say, the child with his 
end in view, made random movements until he acci- 
dentally found one to fit. This movement awakened 
its own characteristic feeling which thenceforward 
remained with him as the idea of the movement 
appropriate to that particular end. If the man 
should acquire a million distinct ends, he must 
acquire a million such motor ideas and a million 
connections between them and the ends. But one 
such connection, subserved by an exclusive nerve 
tract used for no other purpose, will be enough for 
each end. The end conceived will, when these asso- 
ciations are formed, always awaken its own proper 
motor idea. As for the manner in which this idea 
awakens its own proper movement — the one which 
will convert it from an idea into an actual sensation 
— the simplest possible arrangement would be to let 
it serve directly (through its peculiar neural proc- 
ess) as a stimulus to the special motor centre, the 
ultimate sensible effect of whose discharge it pre- 
figures and represents. 

The ordinary theory, however, makes the matter 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 188 °1 

much more complicated. The idea of the end is 
supposed to awaken first a feeling of the proper 
motor innervation, and this, when adjudged right, 
to discharge the muscular combination. 

Now what can be gained by the interposition of 
this second relay of feeling between the idea and 
the movement? Nothing on the score of economy 
of nerve tracts; for it takes just as many of them 
to associate a million ideas with a million motor 
feelings, 1 each specific, as to associate the same 
million ideas with a million insentient motor cen- 
tres. And nothing on the score of precision; for 
the only conceivable way in which they might fur- 
ther precision would be by giving to a mind whose 
notion of the end was vague, a sort of halting stage 
with sharper imagery on which to collect its wits 
before uttering its fiat. But not only are the con- 
scious discriminations between "ends" much 
sharper than any one pretends the shades of dif- 
ference between feelings of innervation to be, but 
even were this not the case, it is impossible to 
see how a mind with its end vaguely conceived, 
could tell out of a lot of Innervationsyefiihle, were 
they never so sharply differentiated, which one 
fitted that end exactly, and which did not. A 
sharply conceived end will on the other hand di- 
rectly awaken a distinct movement as easily as it 
will awaken a distinct feeling of innervation. If 
feelings can go astray through vagueness, surely the 

1 The association between the two orders of feeling being of 
course brought about by a separate neural connection between 
the tracts supporting each. 

158 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

fewer steps of feeling there are interposed, the more 
securely we shall act. We ought then on a priori 
grounds alone to regard the Innervationsgefilhl as a 
pure encumbrance. 

Let us turn now to a posteriori evidence. 

It is a notorious fact, recognized by all writers 1 
on voluntary motion, that the will seems concerned 
only with results and not with the muscular details 
by which they are executed. But when we say 
"results," what is it exactly that we mean? We 
mean, of course, the movements objectively consid- 
ered, and revealing themselves (as either accom- 
plished or in process of being accomplished) to our 
sensible perceptions. Our idea, notion, thought, of 
a movement, what we mean whenever we speak of 
the movement, is this sensible perception which we 
get of it when it is taking place, or has completely 
occurred. 

What then is this sensible perception? 

What does it introspectively seem to be? I un- 
hesitatingly answer: an aggregate of afferent feel- 
ings, coming primarily from the contraction of 
muscles, the stretching of tendons, ligaments, and 
skin, and the rubbing and pressing of joints; and 
secondarily, from the eye, the ear, the skin, nose, 
or palate, any or all of which may be indirectly 
affected by the movement as it takes place in an- 
other part of the body. The only idea of a move- 

1 By no one more clearly set forth than by Hume himself in 
his essay on the "Idea of Necessary Connection." The best 
recent statement I know is by Jaccoud: Des Paraplegies et de 
VAtaxie du Mouvement, Paris, 1864, p. 591. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 188 °1 

ment which we can possess is composed of images of 
these, its afferent effects. By these differences alone 
are movements mentally distinguished from each 
other, and these differences are sufficient for all the 
discriminations we can possibly need to make when 
we intend one movement rather than another. 

The recent writers who have been prompt to 
recognize the fact that volition is directed only to 
results, have hardly been sensible of the far-reach- 
ing consequences of this admission, — consequences 
which will develop themselves as our inquiry pro- 
ceeds. Meanwhile one immediate conclusion fol- 
lows: namely, that there are no such things as 
efferent feelings, or feelings of innervation. These 
are wholly mythological entities. Whoever says 
that in raising his arm he is ignorant of how many 
muscles he contracts, in what order of sequence, 
and in what degrees of intensity, expressly avows a 
colossal amount of unconsciousness of the processes 
of motor discharge. Each separate muscle at any 
rate cannot have its distinct feeling of innervation. 
Wundt, 1 who makes such enormous use of these 
hypothetical feelings in his psychologic construc- 
tion of space, is himself led to admit that they have 
no differences of quality, but feel alike in all 
muscles, and vary only in their degrees of intensity. 2 

J Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Vierteljsch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. i, 
Heft i, S. 36-37, 1867. Phys-iologische Psychologie, S. 316. 

a Harless, in an article which in many respects forestalls what 
I have to say ("Der Apparat des Willens," in Fichte's 
Zeitschrift f. Philos., Bd. 38, 1861), uses the convenient word 
EffectsMld to designate our idea of this sensory result of a 
movement. 

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[1880] THE FEELI ^G OF EFFOET 

They are used by the mind as guides, not of what 
movement, but of how strong a movement it is mak- 
ing, or shall make. But does not this virtually sur- 
render their existence altogether? 

For if anything be obvious to introspection it is 
that the degree of strength of our muscular con- 
tractions is completely revealed to us by afferent 
feelings coming from the muscles themselves and 
their insertions, from the vicinity of the joints, 
and from the general fixation of the larynx, 
chest, face, and body, in the phenomenon of 
effort, objectively considered. When a certain 
degree of energy of contraction rather than another 
is thought of by us, this complex aggregate of 
afferent feelings, forming the material of our 
thought, renders absolutely precise and distinctive 
our mental image of the exact strength of movement 
to be made, and the exact amount of resistance to be 
overcome. 

Let the reader try to direct his will towards a 
particular movement, and then notice what consti- 
tuted the direction of the will. Was it anything 
over and above the notion of the different feelings to 
which the movement when effected would give rise? 
If we abstract from these feelings, will any sign, 
principle, or means of orientation be left, by which 
the will may innervate the right muscles with the 
right intensity, and not go astray into the wrong 
ones? Strip off these images of result, 1 and so far 

1 We speak here only of the muscular exertion, properly so 
called. The difficulty often involved in making the fiat still 
remains a reserved question. 

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from leaving us with a complete assortment of direc- 
tions into which our will may launch itself, you 
leave our consciousness in an absolute and total 
vacuum. If I will to write "Peter" rather than 
"Paul," it is the thought of certain digital sensa- 
tions, of certain alphabetic sounds, of certain ap- 
pearances on the paper, and of no others, which 
immediately precedes the motion of my pen. 

If I will to utter the word Paul rather than Peter, 
it is the thought of my voice falling on my ear, and 
of certain muscular feelings in my tongue, lips, and 
larynx, which guide the utterance. All these feel- 
ings are afferent, and between the thought of them, 
by which the act is mentally specified with all pos- 
sible completeness, and the act itself, there is no 
room for any third order of mental phenomenon. 
Except, indeed, what I have called the fiat, the ele- 
ment of consent, or resolve that the act shall ensue. 
This, doubtless, to the reader's mind, as to my own, 
constitutes the essence of the voluntariness of the 
act. This fiat will be treated of in detail farther 
on. It may be entirely neglected here, for it is a 
constant coefficient, affecting all voluntary actions 
alike, and incapable of serving to distinguish them. 
No one will pretend that its quality varies accord- 
ing as the right or the left arm, for example, is used. 

So far then, we seem free to conclude that an 
anticipatory image of the sensorial consequences of 
a movement, hard or easy, plus the fiat that these 
consequences shall become actual, ought to be able 
to discharge directly the special movement with 

162 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

which in our past experiences the particular con- 
sequences were combined as effects. Furthermore, 
there is no introspective evidence whatever of the 
existence of any intermediate feelings, possessing 
either qualitative or quantitative differences, and 
accompanying the efferent discharge. 1 

Is there, notwithstanding, any circumstantial evi- 
dence? At first sight, it appears as if the circum- 
stantial evidence in favor of efferent feelings were 
very strong. Wundt says 2 that were our motor 
feelings of an afferent nature, "it ought to be ex- 
pected that they would increase and diminish with 
the amount of outer or inner work actually effected 
in contraction. This, however, is not the case, but 
the strength of the motor sensation is purely propor- 
tional to the strength of the impulse to movement, 
which starts from the central organ innervating the 
motor nerves. This may be proved by observations 
made by physicians in cases of morbid alteration in 
the muscular effect. A patient whose arm or leg is 
half paralyzed, so that he can only move the limb 
with great effort, has a distinct feeling of this effort ; 
the limb seems to him heavier than before, appear- 
ing as if weighted with lead; he has, therefore, a 
sense of more work effected than formerly, and yet 
the effected work is either the same or even less. 
Only he must, to get even this effect, exert a 

1 The various degrees of difficulty with which the fiat is given 
form a complication of the utmost importance, reserved for 
discussion further on. 

2 Vorlesungen titer Menschen und Thierseele, Bd. i, p. 222. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 188 °] 

stronger innervation, a stronger motor impulse than 
formerly." 

In complete paralysis also, patients will be con- 
scious of putting forth the greatest exertion to move 
a limb which remains absolutely still upon the bed, 
and from which of course no afferent muscular or 
other feelings can come. 1 

Dr. Ferrier in his Functions of the Brain (Am. 
Ed. pp. 222-224) disposes very easily of this line of 
argument. He says: "It is necessary, however, to 
exclude movements altogether before such an expla- 
nation [as Wundt's] can be adopted. Now, though 
the hemiplegic patient cannot move his paralyzed 
limb, though he is conscious of trying hard, yet he 
will be found to be making powerful muscular exer- 

1 In some instances we get an opposite result. Dr. H. Charlton 
Bastian {British Medical Journal, 1869, p. 461, note) says : 

"Ask a man whose lower extremities are completely par- 
alyzed, whether, when he ineffectually wills to move either of 
these limbs, he is conscious of an expenditure of energy in any 
degree proportionate to that which he would have experienced 
if his muscles had naturally responded to his volition. He will 
tell us rather that he has a sense only of his utter powerless- 
ness, and that his volition is a mere mental act, carrying with 
it no feelings of expended energy such as he is accustomed to 
experience when his muscles are in powerful action, and from 
which action and its consequences alone, as I think, he can 
derive any adequate notion of resistance." 

Dr. J. J. Putnam has quite recently reported to me a case 
of this sort of only a few months' standing. Many amputated 
patients who still feel their lost limbs are unable to make any 
conscious effort to move them. One such case informs me 
that he feels more able to will a distant table to move, than 
to exert the same volition over his acutely-felt lost leg. Others, 
on the contrary {vide Weir Mitchell's book on Gunshot In- 
juries to Nerves), say they can not only will, but, as far as 
their feeling is concerned, execute, movements of their ampu- 

164 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

tion of some kind. Vuipian has called attention to 
the fact, and I have repeatedly verified it, that when 
a hemiplegic patient is desired to close his paralyzed 
fist, in his endeavors to do so he nnconscionsly per- 
forms this action with the sonnd one. It is, in fact, 
almost impossible to exclude such a source of com- 
plication, and unless this is taken into account very 
erroneous conclusions as to the cause of the sense of 
effort may be drawn. In the fact of muscular con- 
traction and the concomitant centripetal impres- 
sions, even though the action is not such as is de- 
sired, the conditions of the consciousness of effort ex- 
ist without our being obliged to regard it as depend- 
ing on central innervation or outgoing currents. 
"It is, however, easy to make an experiment of a 

tated limbs. It would be extremely interesting to unravel the 
causes of these divergences. May it be that in recent cases with 
the recollection of varied movements fresh in the mind, the 
patient has a stock of distinct images of position on which to 
base his fiat; while in an inveterate case, either of paralysis 
with contraction, or of amputation with consciousness of the 
limb in an invariable position, reminiscences of other positions 
have through long desuetude become so incapable of revival 
that there is no preliminary idea of an End for the fiat to knit 
itself to. Such a supposition conforms well to the utterances 
of two amputated persons with whom I have conversed. They 
said it was like "willing into the void," they "did not know how 
to set about it," and so forth. The recency of Dr. Putnam's 
case above mentioned seems, however, to conflict with such an 
explanation and I only make the suggestions in the hope that 
some one with better opportunities for observation than I 
possess, may become interested in the matter. I may add that 
in teaching a new and unnatural movement, the starting-point 
is to awaken by its passive production a distinct sense of what 
the movement, if effected, would feel like. This defines the 
direction of the exertion the pupil is to make. 

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simple nature which will satisfactorily account for 
the sense of effort, even when these unconscious con- 
tractions of the other side, such as hemiplegics 
make, are entirely excluded. 

"If the reader will extend his right arm and hold 
his forefinger in the position required for pulling 
the trigger of a pistol, he may without actually mov- 
ing his finger, but by simply making believe, experi- 
ence a consciousness of energy put forth. Here, 
then, is a clear case of consciousness of energy with- 
out actual contraction of the muscles either of the 
one hand or the other, and without any perceptible 
bodily strain. If the reader will again perform the 
experiment, and pay careful attention to the condi- 
tion of his respiration, he will observe that his con- 
sciousness of effort coincides with a fixation of the 
muscles of his chest, and that in proportion to the 
amount of energy he feels he is putting forth, he is 
keeping his glottis closed and actively contracting 
his respiratory muscles. Let him place his finger as 
before, and continue breathing all the time, and he 
will find that however much he may direct his atten- 
tion to his finger, he will experience not the slightest 
trace of consciousness of effort until he has actually 
moved the finger itself, and then it is referred 
locally to the muscles in action. It is only when 
this essential and ever present respiratory factor is, 
as it has been, overlooked, that the consciousness of 
effort can with any degree of plausibility be as- 
cribed to the outgoing current. In the contraction 
of the respiratory muscles there are the necessary 

166 



[1880] THE FEELING OF EFFORT 

conditions of centripetal impressions, and these are 
capable of originating the general sense of effort. 
When these active efforts are withheld, no con- 
sciousness of effort ever arises, except in so far as it 
is conditioned by the local contraction of the group 
of muscles towards which the attention is directed, 
or by other muscular contractions called uncon- 
sciously into play in the attempt. 

"I am unable to find a single case of consciousness 
of effort which is not explicable in one or other of 
the ways specified. In all instances the conscious- 
ness of effort is conditioned by the actual fact of 
muscular contraction. That it is dependent on 
centripetal impressions generated by the act of con- 
traction, I have already endeavored to show. When 
the paths of the centripetal impressions, or the cere- 
bral centres of the same, are destroyed, there is no 
vestige of a muscular sense. That the central organs 
for the apprehension of the impressions originating 
from muscular contraction, are different from those 
which send out the motor impulse, has already been 
established. But when Wundt argues that this can- 
not be so, because then the sensation would always 
keep pace with the energy of muscular contraction, 
he overlooks the important factor of the fixation of 
the respiratory muscles, which is the basis of the 
general sense of effort in all its varying degrees." 

To these remarks of Ferrier's I have nothing to 
add. Any one may verify them, and they prove 
conclusively that the consciousness of muscular ex- 
ertion, being impossible without movement effected 

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somewhere, must be an afferent and not an efferent 
sensation, a consequence and not an antecedent of 
the movement itself. An idea of the amount of mus- 
cular exertion requisite to perform a certain move- 
ment can consequently be nothing other than an an- 
ticipatory image of the movement's sensible effects. 

Driven thus from the body at large, where shall 
the circumstantial evidence for the feeling of inner- 
vation lodge itself? Where but in the muscles of 
the eye, from which last small retreat it judges itself 
inexpugnable. And, to say the truth, it may well 
be excused for its confidence; for Ferrier alone, so 
far as I know, has ventured to attack it there, and 
his attack must be deemed a very weak failure. 
Nevertheless, that fastness too must fall, and by the 
lightest of bombardments. But, before trying the 
bombardment, let us examine the position with a 
little care, laying down first a few general principles 
about optical vertigo, or illusory appearance of 
movement in objects. 

We judge that an object moves under two dis- 
tinct sets of circumstances : 

1. When its image moves on the retina, and we 
know that the eye is still. 

2. When its image is stationary on the retina, 
and we know that the eye is moving. In this case 
we feel that we follow the object. 

In either of these cases a mistaken judgment about 
the state of the eye will produce optical vertigo. 

If in case 1, we think our eye is still when it is 
really moving, we shall get a movement of the 

168 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

retinal image which we shall judge to be due to a 
real outward motion of the object. This is what 
happens after looking at rushing water, or through 
the windows of a moving railroad car, or after turn- 
ing on one's heel to giddiness. The eyes, without 
our intending to move them, go through a series of 
involuntary rotations, continuing those they were 
previously obliged to make to keep objects in view. 
If the objects had been whirling by to our right, our 
eyes when turned to stationary objects will still 
move slowly towards the right. The retinal image 
upon them will then move like that of an object pass- 
ing to the left. We then try to catch it by volun- 
tarily and rapidly rotating the eyes to the left, when 
the involuntary impulse again rotates the eyes to the 
right, continuing the apparent motion, and so the 
game goes on. 

If in case 2, we think our eyes moving when they 
are in reality still, we shall judge that we are 
following a moving object when we are but fixat- 
ing a steadfast one. Illusions of this kind occur 
after sudden and complete paralysis of special eye 
muscles, and the partizans of feelings of efferent 
innervation regard them as experimenta cruris. 
Helmholtz writes 1 : "When the external rectus 
muscle of the right eye, or its nerve, is paralyzed, 
the eye can no longer be rotated to the right side. 
So long as the patient turns it only to the nasal side 
it makes regular movements, and he perceives cor- 
rectly the position of objects in the visual field. So 

1 Plujsiologisclie Optik, p. 600. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 18 ^ 

soon, however, as he tries to rotate it outwardly, 
i.e., towards the right, it ceases to obey his will, 
stands motionless in the middle of its course, and 
the objects appear flying to the right, although posi- 
tion of eye and retinal image are unaltered. 1 

"In such a case the exertion of the will is fol- 
lowed neither by actual movement of the eye, nor 
by contraction of the muscle in question, nor even 
by increased tension in it. The act of will pro- 
duced absolutely no effects beyond the nervous sys- 
tem, and yet we judge of the direction of the line of 
vision as if the will had exercised its normal effects. 
We believe it to have moved to the right, and since 
the retinal image is unchanged, we attribute to the 
object the same movement we have erroneously as- 
cribed to the eye. . . . These phenomena leave no 
room for doubt that we only judge the direction of 
the line of sight by the effort of will with which we 
strive to change the position of our eyes. There are 
also certain weak feelings in our eyelids, . . . and 
furthermore in excessive lateral rotations we feel 
a fatiguing strain in the muscles. But all these 
feelings are too faint and vague to be of use in the 
perception of direction. We feel then what impulse 
of the will, and how strong a one, we apply to turn 
our eye into a given position." 

Partial paralysis of the same muscle, paresis, as 

it has been called, seems to point even more con- 

1 Tlie left and sound eye is here supposed covered. If both 
eyes look at the same field there are double images which stiU 
more perplex the judgment. The patient, however, learns to 
see correctly before many days or weeks are over. W. J. 

170 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

clusivel y to the same inference, that the will to 
innervate is felt independently of all its afferent 
results. I will quote the account given by a very 
recent authority, 1 of the effects of this accident : 

"When the nerve going to an eye muscle, e.g., the 
external rectus of one side, falls into a state of 
paresis, the first result is that the same volitional 
stimulus, which under normal circumstances would 
have perhaps rotated the eye to its extreme position 
outwards, now is competent to effect only a mod- 
erate outward rotation, say of 20°. If now, shut- 
ting the sound eye, the patient looks at an object 
situated just so far outwards from the paretic eye 
that this latter must turn 20° in order to see it dis- 
tinctly, the patient will feel as if he had moved it 
not only 20° towards the side, but into its extreme 
lateral position, for the impulse of innervation 
requisite for bringing it into view is a perfectly 
conscious act, whilst the diminished state of con- 
traction of the paretic muscle lies for the present out 
of the ken of consciousness. The test proposed by 
von Graefe, of localization by the sense of touch, 
serves to render evident the error which the patient 
now makes. If we direct him to touch rapidly the 
object looked at, with the forefinger of the hand of 
the same side, the line through which the finger 
moves will not be the line of sight directed 20° out- 
ward, but will approach more nearly to the extreme 
possible outward line of vision." 2 

1 Alfred Graefe, in HandbucJi der gesammten Augenheilkunde, 
Bd. vi, S. 18. 

2 Ibid,, p. 21. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 188 °3 

A stone cutter with the external rectus of the left 
eye paralyzed, will strike his hand instead of his 
chisel with his hammer, until experience has taught 
him wisdom. 

It appears as if here the judgment of direction 
could only arise from the excessive innervation of 
the rectus when the object is looked at. All the af- 
ferent feelings must be identical with those experi- 
enced when the eye is sound, and the judgment is 
correct. The eyeball is rotated just 20° in the one 
case as in the other, the image falls on the same 
part of the retina, the pressures on the eyeball and 
the tensions of the skin and conjunctiva are iden- 
tical. There is only one feeling which can vary, 
and lead us to our mistake. That feeling must 
be the effort which the will makes, moderate 
in the one case, excessive in the other, but in both 
cases an efferent feeling, pure and simple. 

Beautiful and clear as this reasoning seems to be, 
it is based on an incomplete inventory of the afferent 
data. The writers have all omitted to consider 
what is going on in the other eye. This is kept 
covered during the experiments to prevent double 
images, and other complications. But if its condi- 
tion under these circumstances be examined, it will 
be found to present changes which must result in 
strong afferent feelings. And the taking account 
of these feelings demolishes in an instant all the 
conclusions which the authors from whom I have 
quoted, base upon their supposed absence. This I 
will now proceed to show. 

172 



[1880] the FEELING OF EFFORT 

Take first the case of complete paralysis and 
assume the right eye affected. Suppose the patient 
desires to rotate his gaze to an object situated in 
the extreme right of the field of vision. As Hering 
has so beautifully shown, both eyes move by a 
common act of innervation, and in this instance 
both move towards the right. But the paralyzed 
right eye stops short in the middle of its course, 
the object still appearing far to the right of its 
fixation point. The left sound eye, meanwhile, 
although covered, continues its rotation until the 
extreme rightward limit thereof has been reached. 
To an observer looking at both eyes the left will 
seem to squint. Of course this continued and ex- 
treme rotation produces afferent feelings of right- 
ward motion in the eyeball, which momentarily 
overpower the faint feelings of central position in 
the diseased and uncovered eye. The patient feels 
by his left eyeball as if he were following an object 
which by his right retina he perceives he does not 
overtake. All the conditions of optical vertigo 
are here present: the image stationary on the ret- 
ina, and the erroneous conviction that the eyes are 
moving. 

The objection that a feeling in the right eyeball 
ought not to produce a conviction that the left eye 
moves, will be considered in a moment. Let us 
meanwhile turn to the case of simple paresis with 
apparent translocation of the field. 

Here the right eye succeeds in fixating the object, 
but observation of the left eye will reveal to an 

173 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1880] 

observer the fact that it squints just as violently 
inwards as in the former case. The direction which 
the finger of the patient takes in pointing to the 
object, is the direction of this squinting and cov- 
ered left eye. As Graefe says (although he fails 
to seize the true import of his own observation), 
"It appears to have been by no means sufficiently 
noticed how significantly the direction of the line 
of sight of the secondarily deviating eye [i.e., of the 
left] and the line of direction of the pointed finger 
agree." 

The translocation would, in a word, be perfectly 
explained, could we suppose that the sensation of a 
certain degree of rotation in the left eyeball were 
able to suggest to the patient the position of an 
object whose image falls on the right retina alone. 
Can, then, a feeling in one eye be confounded with 
a feeling in the other? 

Not only Donders and Adamuk, by their vivi- 
sections, but Hering, by his exquisite optical ex- 
periments, have proved that the apparatus of inner- 
vation for both eyes is single, and that they func- 
tion as one organ — a double eye, according to Her- 
ing, or what Helmholtz calls a Gyclopenauge. Now 
the retinal feelings of this double organ, singly in- 
nervated, are also to a great extent absolutely in- 
distinguishable, namely, where they fall in corre- 
sponding points. But even where they are 
numerically distinguishable, they are indistinguish- 
able with respect to our knowing whether they be- 
long to the left retina or to the right. When, as 

174 



[1880] THE FEELING OF EFFORT 

so often happens, part of a distant object is hidden 
from one eye by the edge of an intervening body, 
and seen only by the other eye, we rarely know by 
onr spontaneous feeling that this is the case, nor 
when we have noticed the fact can we tell which 
eye is seeing and which is eclipsed. If the reader 
will hold two needles in front of his nose, one of 
them behind the other, and look at the distant one 
with both eyes, the near one will appear to him 
double. But he will be quite unable, by his mere 
feeling, to say to which eye either of the double im- 
ages belong. If he gives an opinion, he will prob- 
ably say the right image belongs to the right eye, 
the reverse being really the case. 1 In short, we use 
our retinal sensations indifferently, and only to 
tell us where their objects lie. It takes long prac- 
tice directed specially ad hoc, to teach us on which 
retina the sensations respectively fall. 

Now the different sensations which arise from 
the positions of the eyeballs are also used exclu- 
sively as signs of the position of objects; an object 
directly fixated, being localized habitually at the 
intersection of the two optical axes, but without any 
separate consciousness on our part that the position 
of one axis is different from another. All we are 
aware of is a consolidated feeling of a certain 
"strain" in the eyeballs, accompanied by the per- 
ception that just so far in front and so far to the 
right or to the left, there is an object which we see. 

1 See also TV. B. Rogers, Silliman's Journal, 1860, for other 
curious examples of this incapacity. 

175 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS ti8803 

This being the case, our patient paretic of the right 
external rectus, might be expected to see objects, 
not only transposed to the right, but also nearer 
because the intersection of his squinting axes is 
nearer, and smaller because a retinal image of fixed 
size awakens the judgment of an object small in 
proportion as it is judged near. Whether paretic 
patients of this kind are subject to this additional 
illusion remains to be discovered by examinations 
which ophthalmologists in large practice alone have 
the opportunity of making. 1 It is worth while to 

1 In three recent cases examined for me by ophthalmological 
friends this additional delusion seemed absent, and I also found 
it absent in a case of paralysis of the external rectus with 
translocation which, by Dr. Wadsworth's kindness, I lately ex- 
amined at the hospital. The "absence" spoken of was in all 
these cases a vacillating and uncertain judgment rather than 
a steadfastly positive judgment that distance and size were 
unaltered. 

The extraordinary vacillation of our judgments of size and 
distance will be noticed by any one who has experimented with 
slightly concave, convex, or prismatic glasses. The most famil- 
iar example is that of looking at the moon through an opera- 
glass. It looks larger, so its details are more distinctly seen; 
being so distinct it looks nearer, and because it seems nearer 
it is also judged smaller (Auber's secundare Urtheilstauschung) . 
Many experiments may be devised by which the left eye may be 
made to converge by a prism whilst the right looks either at 
the same object or sees one of the double images of a more 
distant object whose other double image is cut off by a screen 
from the left retina. Under these circumstances we get trans- 
locations which may be similar to those in paresis but they 
prove nothing to our purpose, for the moment the prism is in- 
troduced before the left eye, altering its convergence, the right 
eye moves sympathetically, giving rise to a translation of its 
retinal image, which of course suggests translocation of the 
object. The only experiment capable of proving the theory 
advanced in the text would be one in which no shifting of the 

176 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

observe, however, that the feeling of accommodation 
and the knowledge of the true size of the object con- 
spire with the feeling of convergence to give the 
judgment of distance. And where the convergence 
is an altogether abnormal one, as in the paretic 
squint, the feeling of the left eyeball being excessive, 
might well simply overpower all other feelings and 
leave no clear impression whatever save a general 
one of looking far towards the right. 

The only thoroughly crucial test of the explana- 
tion here proposed of the paretic translocation, 
would be a case in which the left eye alone looked at 
the object whilst the right, looking at nothing, 
strongly converged. Since, however, the only way 
of making a normal eye converge is to give it an 
object to look at, it would seem at first sight as if 
such a case could never be obtained. It has oc- 
curred to me, notwithstanding, that slight atropini- 
zation of one eye might cause such strong accommo- 
dative innervation, that the convergent muscles 
might sympathetically contract, and a squint tend 
to occur. The squint would be steadfast, and situ- 
ated in the non-atropinized eye, if it were covered 
and the poisoned eye alone made to fixate a near 
object. And if under these circumstances the ob- 
ject thus monocularly seen were translocated out- 
image on the right retina accompanied the turning inwards of 
the left eye. The experiment without prisms mentioned by 
Hering (Lelire vom Mnocularen Sehen, pp. 12-14) seems the 
nearest approach which we can make to this, but there tooth 
eyes fixate the same objects, and there is some translation of 
the image. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 188 °J 

wardly, we should have a complete verification of 
the explanation I present. The innervation is 
wholly different from that in paresis, and the only 
point the two cases have in common is the covered 
eye rotated nasalwards. Probably it would not be 
easy to find the patient, or the dose of atropia just 
fitted for producing the squint. But one positive 
instance would outweigh a hundred negative ones. 
I have had a chance to experiment on but one per- 
son. A large needle was stuck in a horizontal 
board, whose edges touched the face, the needle 
being from eight to twelve inches in front of the 
right atropinized eye. The subject was told to touch 
with her finger the under surface of the board, just 
beneath the needle. The results were negative, — no 
well-marked squint being perceptible, — but on the 
third day after the atropinization, the patient regu- 
larly placed her finger from one-half to three-quar- 
ters of an inch too far to the right. Other observa- 
tions ought to be made. 

There seems meanwhile to be a very good nega- 
tive instance by which to corroborate our argu- 
ments. If we whirl about on our heel to the right, 
objects will, as above-mentioned, seem to whirl 
about us to the left as soon as we stand still. This 
is due to the fact that our eyes are unwittingly 
making slow movements to the right, corrected at 
intervals by quick voluntary ones to the left. There 
is then in the eyes a permanent excess of rightward 
innervation, the reflex resultant of our giddiness. 
The intermittent movements to the left by which we 

178 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

correct this, simply confirm and intensify the im- 
pression it gives us of a leftward whirling in the 
field of view : we seem to ourselves to be periodically 
pursuing and overtaking the objects in their left- 
ward flight. Now if we convert this periodic volun- 
tary action into permanent action, by holding the 
eyeballs still in spite of their reflex tendency to 
rotate (i.e., by using such an excess of leftward 
voluntary innervation as would keep us fixating one 
object), we ought, if truly conscious of the degree of 
our voluntary innervation, to feel our eyes actually 
moving towards the left. And this feeling should 
produce in us the judgment that we are steadily 
following with our gaze a leftward moving field of 
view. As a matter of fact, however, this never hap- 
pens. What does happen is that the field of view 
stops its motion the moment our eyes stop theirs. 1 

1 The subject of optical vertigo has been best treated by 
Breuer in Strieker's Medizinische Jahi^ucher, Jahrg. 1874, 1 
Heft (see also 1875, 1 Heft). Hoppe's more recent #ork "Die 
Scheinbewegungen," I have not seen. I ought to say that 
Mach (Grundlinien der Lelire von den Bewegungsempflndun- 
gen, 1875, pp. 83-85) denies that in his case fixating a point 
causes the apparent movement of objects to stop. His case is 
certainly exceptional, but need not invalidate in the least our 
theory. The eye-motions in all cases are reflex results of a 
sensation of subjective whirling of the body due most prob- 
ably to excitement of the semi-circular canals. This is not 
arrested in any one by fixing the eyes ; and persisting in Mach 
with a constant field of view, may in him be sufficient to sug- 
gest the judgment that the field follows him in his flight, 
whilst in the average observer the further addition of a moving 
retinal image may be requisite for the full production of that 
psychic impression. All the feelings in question are rather 
confused and fluctuating, while the nausea which rapidly 
supervenes stands in the way of our becoming adepts in their 
observation. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 188 °3 

Nothing could more conclusively prove the inability 
of mere innervation (however complex or intense) 
to influence our perception. Nothing could more 
completely vindicate the idea that effected* move- 
ments, through the afferent sensations they give rise 
to, are alone what serve as premises in our motor 
judgments. 1 

II. Ideo-Motor Action 

So far then, so good. We have got rid of a very 
obstructive complication in relegating the feeling of 
muscular exertion properly so called, to that vast 
and well-known class of afferent feelings, none of 

1 Let it not be objected that the involuntary rightward 
motion of the eyeballs which misled us, after standing still, 
into the impression that the world was moving, was "effected" 
and ought to have given us afferent sensations strong enough 
to prevent our being deluded by the image passing over the 
retina. No doubt we get these afferent sensations and with 
sufficient practice would rightly interpret them. But as the 
experiment is actually made, neither they nor the moving image 
on the retina (which far overpowers them in vivacity of im- 
pression) are expected. When we intend a movement of the 
eyes, the world being supposed at rest, we always expect both 
these sensations. Whenever the latter has come unexpectedly 
we have been in presence of a really moving object, and every 
moment of our lives moving objects are giving us unexpectedly 
this experience. Of prolonged unexpected movements of the 
eyes we never under normal circumstances have any experi- 
ence whatever. What wonder then that the intense and familiar 
sensation of an unexpectedly moving retinal image should 
wholly overpower the feeble and almost unknown one of an 
unexpected and prolonged movement of the eyeballs and be 
interpreted as if it existed alone. I cannot doubt however 
that with sufficient practice we should all learn so to attend 
to and interpret the feelings of the moving eyeballs as to reduce 
the retinal experience to its proper signification. 

180 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

whose other members are held by any one to be es- 
pecially connected with the mysterious sentiments 
of effort and power, which are the subjects of our 
study. All muscle feelings eliminated, the question 
stands out pure and simple : What is the volitional 
effort proper? What makes it easy to raise the 
finger, hard to get out of bed on a cold morning, 
harder to keep our attention on the insipid image 
of a procession of sheep when troubled with insom- 
nia, and hardest of all to say No to the temptation of 
any form of instinctive pleasure which has grown 
inveterate and habitual. In a word what is the na- 
ture of this fiat of which we have so often spoken? 1 

1 The philosophic importance of clearing the ground for the 
question may be shown by the example of Maine de Biran. 
This thoroughly original writer's whole life was devoted to 
the task of showing that the primordial fact of conscious 
personality was the sentiment of volitional effort. This intimate 
sense is the self in each of us. "It becomes the self by the sole 
fact of the distinction which establishes itself between the sub- 
ject of the effort and the term which resists by its own inertia. 
The ego cannot begin to know itself or to exist for itself, except 
in so far as it can distinguish itself as subject of an effort, from 
a term which resists" {CEuvres Inedites, Vol. I, pp. 208, 212). 
Maine de Biran makes this resisting term the muscle, though 
it is true he does not, like so many of his successors, think we 
have an efferent sense of its resistance. Its resistance is known 
to us by a muscular sensation proper, the effect of the contrac- 
tion (p. 213). We shall show in the sequel that this sensation 
resists our fiat or volitional effort proper in no degree qua mus- 
cular, but simply qua disagreeable. Any other disagreeable 
sensation whatever may equally well serve as the term which 
resists our fiat that it become real. M. de B.'s giving such a 
monstrous monopoly to the muscular feelings is a consequence 
of his not having completed the discrimination I make in the 
text between all afferent sensations together on the one hand, 
and the fiat on the other. Muscle feelings for him still occupy 
an altogether singular, hybrid and abnormal sort of position. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EE VIEWS t 1880 l 

In our bed we think of the cold, and we feel the 
warmth and lie still, but we all the time feel that 
we can get up with no trouble if we will. The diffi- 
culty is to will. We say to our intemperate ac- 
quaintance, "You can be a new man, if you will" 
But he finds the willing impossible. One who talks 
nonsense under the influence of hasheesh, realizes 
all the time his power to end his sentences soberly 
and sensibly, if he will. But his will feels as yet no 
sufficient reason for exerting itself. A person lying 
in one of those half -trance-like states of immobility 
not infrequent with nervous patients, feels the power 
to move undiminished, but cannot resolve to mani- 
fest it. And cases might be multiplied indefinitely in 
which the fiat is not only a distinct, but a difficult 
and effort-requiring moment in the performance. 

On the other hand cases may be multiplied in- 
definitely of actions performed with no distinct 
volitional fiat at all, — the mere presence of an in- 
tellectual image of the movement, and the absence 
of any conflicting image, being adequate causes of 
its production. As Lotze says 1 : "The spectator ac- 
companies the throwing of a billiard ball, or the 

1 HediciniscJie Psychologie, 1852, p. 293. In his admirably 
acute chapter on the will this author has most explicitly main- 
tained the position that what we call muscular exertion is 
an afferent and not an efferent feeling: "We must affirm uni- 
versally that in the muscular feeling we are not sensible of the 
force on its way to produce an effect, but only of the sufferance 
already produced in our moveable organs, the muscles, after the 
force has, in a manner unobservable by us, exerted upon them 
its causality" (p. 311). How often the battles of psychology 
have to be fought over again, each time with heavier armies 
and bigger trains, though not always with so able generals. 

182 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

thrust of the swordsman with slight movements of 
his arm ; the untaught narrator tells his story with 
many gesticulations; the reader while absorbed in 
the perusal of a battle scene feels a slight tension 
run through his muscular system, keeping time as it 
were with the actions he is reading of. These 
results become the more marked the more we are 
absorbed in thinking of the movements which sug- 
gest them; they grow fainter exactly in proportion 
as a complex consciousness, under the dominion of a 
crowd of other representations, withstands the pass- 
ing over of mental contemplation into outward 
action. . . . We see in writing or piano-playing a 
great number of very complicated movements fol- 
lowing quickly one upon the other, the instigative 
representations of which remained scarcely a second 
in consciousness, certainly not long enough to 
awaken any other volition than the general one of 
resigning oneself without reserve to the passing over 
of representation into action. All the actions of 
our daily life happen in this wise: Our standing 
up, walking, talking, all this never demands a dis- 
tinct impulse of the will, but is adequately brought 
about by the pure flux of thought." 

Dr. Carpenter has proposed the name ideo-motor 
for these actions without a special fiat. And in the 
chapter of his Mental Physiology bearing this title 
may be found a very full collection of instances. 1 

1 Professor Bain has also amply illustrated the subject in his 
work on the Senses and Intellect, 3d edition, pp. 336-343. He 
considers that these facts prove that the ideas of motion inhabit 
identical nerve tracts with the actualized motions. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £1880] 

It is to be noted that among the most frequent cases 
of this sort are those acts which result from ideas 
or perceptions, intercurrent as it were to the main 
stream of our thought, and it may be logically dis- 
connected therewith. I am earnestly talking with a 
friend, when I notice a piece of string on the floor. 
The next instant I have picked it up, with no delib- 
erate resolve to do so, and with no check to my con- 
versation. Or, I am lying in my warm bed, en- 
grossed in some revery or other, when the notion 
suddenly strikes me "it is getting late," and before 
I know it, I am up in the cold, having executed 
without the smallest effort of resolve, an action 
which, half an hour previous, with full conscious- 
ness of the pros and the cons, the warm rest and the 
chill, the sluggishness and the manliness, time lost 
and the morning's duties, I was utterly unable to 
decide upon. 

I then lay it down as a second corner-stake in our 
inquiry, that every representation of a motion 
awakens the actual motion which is its object, 
unless inhibited by some antagonistic representation 
simultaneously present to the mind. 

It is somewhat dangerous to base dogmatic con- 
clusions on the experiments so far made on the 
cerebral cortex, nevertheless they may help to con- 
firm conclusions already probable on other grounds. 
Munk's vivisectional experiments on the cortical 
centres seem much the most minute and elaborate 
which have yet been reported. Now Munk con- 
cludes from them that the so-called motor centres 

184 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

of Hitzig and Ferrier, each of which, when elec- 
trically irritated, provokes a characteristic move- 
ment in some part of the body, are sensory centres, 
— the centres for the feelings of tonch, pressure, po- 
sition, and motion of the bodily parts in question. 
The entire zone which contains them is called by him 
the Fuhlsphdre of the cerebral surface, and is made 
co-ordinate with the Sehsphare and Horspliare? 

Electric excitement of the forepaw centre can 
then only give us an image of the paw in some result- 
ant state of flexion or extension. And the reason 
why motor effects occur like clock-work when this 
centre is irritated, would be that this image is 
awakened with such extraordinary vivacity by the 
stimulus that no other idea in the animal's mind can 
be strong enough to inhibit its discharging into the 
insentient motor centres below. 

Now the reader may still shake his head and say : 
"But can you seriously mean that all the wonder- 
fully exact adjustment of my action's strength to its 
ends, is not a matter of outgoing innervation? Here 
is a cannon-ball, and here a pasteboard box: in- 
stantly and accurately I lift each from the table, the 

1 Munk (Du Bois-Reymond's Archiv filr Physiologie, 1878, 
pp. 177-178 and 549). It is true that Munk still believes in 
the Innervationsgefiihl, only he supposes it to be a result of the 
activity of the lower motor centres, not coming to conscious- 
ness in situ, but transmitted upwards by fibres to the zone in 
question, and there perceived along with the passive feelings of 
the part involved. It is needless to say that there is not an 
atom of objective ground for the belief in these afferent inner- 
vation feelings — even less than for the efferent ones ordinarily 
assumed. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £1880] 

ball not refusing to rise because my innervation was 
too weak, the box not flying abruptly into the air be- 
cause it was too strong. Could representations of 
the movement's different sensory effects in the two 
cases be so delicately foreshadowed in the mind? or 
being there, is it credible that they should, all un- 
aided, so delicately graduate the stimulation of the 
unconscious motor centres to their work?" Even 
so! I reply to both queries. We have a most ex- 
tremely delicate foreshadowing of the sensory ef- 
fects. Why else the start of surprise that runs 
through us, if some one has filled the light-seeming 
box with sand before we try to lift it, or has substi- 
tuted for the cannon-ball which we know, a painted 
wooden imitation? Surprise can only come from 
getting a sensation which differs from the one we 
expect. But the truth is that when we know the 
objects well, the very slightest difference from the 
expected weight will surprise us, or at least attract 
our notice. With unknown objects we begin by ex- 
pecting the weight made probable by their appear- 
ance. The expectation of this sensation innervates 
our lift, and we "set" it rather small at first. An 
instant verifies whether it is too small. Our expec- 
tation rises, i.e., we think in a twinkling of a setting 
of the chest and teeth, a bracing of the back, and a 
more violent feeling in the arms. Quicker than 
thought we have them, and with them the burden 
ascends into the air. Bernhardt 1 has shown in a 

1 Archiv fiir Psychiatrie, III, pp. 618-635. Bernhardt strangely 
enough seems to think that what his experiments disprove is 

186 



[1880] THE FEELING OF EFFORT 

rough experimental way that our estimation of the 
amount of a resistance is as delicately graduated 
when our wills are passive, and our limbs made to 
contract by direct local faradization, as when we 
ourselves innervate them. Ferrier 1 has repeated 
and verified the observations. They admit of no 
great precision, and too much stress should not be 
laid upon them either way, but at the very least, 
they tend to show that no added delicacy would 
accrue to our perception from the consciousness of 
the efferent process, even if it existed. 



III. The Inscrutable Psycho-physio Nexus is 
identical in all innervation and lies outside 
the Sphere of the Will 

On the ordinary theory, the movements which ac- 
company emotion, and those which we call volun- 
tary, are of a fundamentally different character. 
The emotional movements are admitted to be dis- 
charged without intermediary by the mere presence 
of the exciting idea. The voluntary motions are 
said to follow the idea only after an intermediate 

the existence of afferent muscular feelings, not those of efferent 
innervation — apparently because he deems that the peculiar 
thrill of the electricity ought to overpower all other afferent 
feelings from the part. But it is far more natural to interpret 
his results the other way, even aside from the certainty yielded 
.by other evidence that passive muscular feelings exist. This 
other evidence is compendiously summed up by Sachs in 
Reichert unci Du Bois' Archiv, 1874, pp. 174-188. 
1 Functions of the Brain, p. 228. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 188 °1 

conscious process of "innervation" has been aroused. 
On the present theory the only difference lies in the 
fact that the emotions show a peculiar congenital 
connection of certain forms of idea with certain 
very specially combined movements, largely of the 
"involuntary" muscles, but also of the others — as 
in fear, anger, etc. — such connection being non- 
congenital in voluntary action; and in the further 
fact that the discharge of idea into movement is 
much more readily inhibited by other casually pres- 
ent ideas in the case of voluntary action, and less 
so in the case of emotions ; though here, too, inhibi- 
tion takes place on a large scale. 1 

That one set of ideas should compel the vascular, 
respiratory, and gesticulatory symptoms of shame, 
another those of anger, a third those of grief, a 
fourth those of laughter, and a fifth those of sexual 
excitement, is a most singular fact of our organiza- 
tion, which the labors of a Darwin have hardly even 
begun to throw light upon. Where such a prear- 
rangement of the nerve centres exists, the way to 
awaken the motor symptoms is to awaken first the 
idea and then to dwell upon it. The thought of our 
enemy soon brings with it the bodily ebullition, 
of our loss the tears, of our blunder the blush. We 
even read of persons who can contract their pupils 
voluntarily by steadily imagining a brilliant light — 
that being the sensation to which the pupils nor- 
mally respond. 

1 Witness the evaporation of manifestations of disgust in the 
presence of fear, of lust in the presence of respect, etc., etc. 

188 



[1880] the FEELING OF EFFORT 

"It is possible to weep at will by trying to recall 
that peculiar feeling in the trigeminal nerve which 
habitually precedes tears. Some can even succeed 
in sweating voluntarily, by the lively recollection of 
the characteristic skin sensations, and the volun- 
tary reproduction of an indescribable sort of feeling 
of relaxation, which ordinarily precedes the flow 
of perspiration. Finally, it is well known how 
easily the thought of gustatory stimuli excites the 
activity of the salivary glands. This capacity to 
indirectly excite activities usually involuntary, is 
much more pronounced in certain diseases. Hy- 
pochondriacs know well how easily the heart-beat 
may be made to alter, or even cramps of single 
muscles, feelings of aura, and so forth, be brought 
about in this way, which no doubt in the religious 
epidemics of the Middle Ages, led to the imitative 
spread of ecstatic convulsions, from one person to 
another." 1 It suffices to think steadily of the feel- 
ing of yawning, to provoke the act in most persons ; 
and in every one in certain states, to imagine vomit- 
ing is to vomit. 

The great play of individual idiosyncrasy in all 
these matters, shows that the following or not fol- 
lowing of action upon representation is a matter 
of connections among nervous centres, which con- 
nections may fluctuate widely in extent. The ordi- 
nary "voluntary" act results in this way: First, 
some feeling produces a movement in a reflex, or as 
we say, accidental way. The movement excites a 

1 Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, p. 303. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1880] 

sensorial tract, causing a feeling which, whenever 
the sensorial tract functions again, revives as an 
idea. Now the sensorial and motor tracts, thus 
associated in their actions, remain associated for- 
ever afterwards, and as the motor originally 
aroused the sensory, so the sensory may now arouse 
the motor (provided no outlying ideational tracts 
in connection with it prevent it from so doing). 
Voluntary acts are in fact nothing but acts whose 
motor centres are so constituted that they can be 
aroused by these sensorial centres, whose excite- 
ment was originally their effect. Acts, the inner- 
vation of which cannot thus run up its primal 
stream, are not voluntary. But the line of division 
runs differently in different individuals. 

Now notice that in all this, whether the act do 
follow or not upon the representation is a matter 
quite immaterial so far as the willing of the act 
represented goes. I will to write, and the act fol- 
lows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that 
the distant table slide over the floor towards me; 
it also does not. My willing representation can no 
more instigate my sneezing centre, than it can insti- 
gate the table, to activity. But in both cases, it is as 
true and good willing as it was when I willed to 
write. In a word, volition is a psychic or moral 
fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed 
when the intention or consent is there. The super- 
vention of motion upon its completion is a super- 
numerary phenomenon belonging to the department 
of physiology exclusively, and depending on the or- 

190 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

ganic structure and condition of executive ganglia, 
whose functioning is quite unconscious. 

In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the repre- 
sentation of a movement and the consent to it take 
place normally. But the inferior executive cen- 
tres are deranged, and although the ideas discharge 
them, they do not discharge them so as to reproduce 
the precise sensations which they prefigure. In 
aphasia the patient has an image of certain words 
which he wishes to utter, but when he opens his 
mouth, he hears himself making quite unintended 
sounds. This may fill him with rage and despair — 
which passions only show how intact his will re- 
mains. 1 

Paralysis only goes a step farther. The associa- 
tive mechanism is not only deranged but altogether 
broken through. The volition occurs, but the hand 
remains as still as the table. The paralytic is made 
aware of this by the absence of the expected change 
in his afferent sensations. He tries harder, i.e., he 

1 In ataxy it is true that the sensations resultant from move- 
ment are usually disguised by anaesthesia. This has led to 
false explanations of the symptom (Leyden, Die graue Degen- 
eration des Ruckenmarks, 1863). But the undeniable existence 
of atactics without a trace of insensibility proves the trouble 
to be due to disorder of the associating machinery between the 
centres of ideation and those of discharge. These latter cases 
have been used by some authors in support of the Innerva- 
tiongefilhl theory (Classen: Das Schlussverfahren des Sehactes, 
1863, p. 50) ; the spasmodic irregular movements being 
interpreted as the result of an imperfect sense of the amount 
of innervation we are exerting. There is no subjective evidence 
whatever of such a state. The undoubtedly true theory is 
best expounded by Jaccoud : Des ParapUgies et de VAtaxie 
Motriee, 1864, Part iii., Chap. ii. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1880 ! 

mentally frames the sensation of muscular "effort" 
with consent that it shall occur. It does so: he 
frowns, he heaves his chest, he clenches his other 
fist, but the palsied arm lies passive. 1 It may then 
be that the thought of his impotence shall make 
his will, like a Rarey-tamed horse, forever after- 
wards cowed, inhibited, impossible, with respect to 
that particular motion. 2 

The special case of the limb being completely an- 
aesthetic, as well as atactic, curiously illustrates 
the merely external and quasi-accidental connection 
between muscular motion and the thought which in- 
stigates it. We read of cases like this: 

"Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the 
moment the patient ceases to take note of them 
by his eyes. Thus after having made him close his 
eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either 
wholly or in part, he does it but cannot tell whether 
the effected movement is large or small, strong or 
weak, or even if it has taken place at all. And 
when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from 
right to left, for example, he declares that he had 
a very inexact notion of the extent of the effected 
movement. ... If, having the intention of execut- 
ing a certain movement, / prevent him, he does not 

*A normal palsy occurs during sleep. We will all sorts of 
motions in our dreams, but seldom perform any of them. In 
nightmare we become conscious of the non-performance, and 
will the "effort." This seems then to occur in a restricted way, 
limiting itself to the occlusion of the glottis and producing the 
respiratory anxiety which wakes us up. 

2 Vide supra, p. 8, note 3. 
192 



[isso] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

perceive it, and supposes the limb to have taken the 
position he intended to give it." 1 Or this : 

"The patient when his eyes were closed in the 
middle of an unpractised movement, remained with 
the extremity in the position it had when the eyes 
closed and did not complete the movement properly. 
Then after some oscillations the limb gradually 
sank by reason of its weight (the sense of fatigue 
being absent). Of this the patient was not aware, 
and wondered when he opened his eyes, at the 
altered position of his limb." 2 

In the normal state of man there is always a 
possibility that action may not occur in this simple 
ideo-motor way. The motor ideas may awaken 
other ideas which inhibit the discharge into the 
executive ganglia. But in the state called hypno- 
tism we have a condition analogous to sleep in so 
far forth that the ideas which turn up do not 
awaken their habitual and most reasonable asso- 
ciates. Their motor effects are therefore not in- 
hibited, and the hypnotized subject not only believes 
everything that is told him, however improbable, 
but he acts out every motor suggestion which he 
receives. The eminent French philosopher, Eenou- 
vier, as early as 1859, expressly assimilated these 
facts of hypnotism to the ordinary ideo-motor ac- 
tions, and to those effects of moral vertigo and fasci- 

1 Landry : "Memoire sur la Paralysie du Sens Musculaire," 
in Gazette des Hopitaux, 1855, p. 270. 

1 Takacs, "Ueber die Verspatung der Empflndungsleitung," 
Archiv fur Psycliiatrie, Bd. x, Heft ii, p. 533. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 188 °] 

nation which make us fall when we are on heights, 
laugh from the fear of laughing, etc., etc. His ac- 
count of the psychology of volition 1 is the firmest, 
and in my opinion, the truest connected treatment 
yet given to the subject by any author with whom I 
am acquainted. 



IV. The Will connects Terms in the Mental 
Sphere only 

We must now leave behind us the cases of ex- 
tremely uncomplicated mental motivation, which 
we have hitherto considered, and take up others 
where the tendency of a particular motor idea to 
take effect is arrested or delayed. These are the 
cases where the -fiat, the distinct decision, or the 
volitional effort, come in; and we find them of 
many degrees of complexity. 

First there are cases with no effort properly so 
called, either of muscle or resolution: shall I put 
on this hat or that? Shall I draw a horse or a man 
on the sheet of paper which this amusement-craving 
child brings me? Shall I move my index finger or 
my little finger to show my "liberum arbitrmm in- 

1 Essais de Critique Ge'ne'rale; 2me Essai, Psychologie ration- 
nelle, pp. 237 and following. 2me Edition, 1875, Tome 1, pp. 
367-408. Heidenhain, in an interesting pamphlet (Der sogen- 
nante thierische Magnetismus, Leipzig, 1880), has recently pro- 
pounded the opinion that in hypnotized subjects the hemi- 
spheres are thrown entirely out of gear and no ideas whatever 
awakened. This opinion is so much at variance with that of 
English and French observers that further corroboration is re- 
quired. 

194 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

differ entice?" In the mountains, in youth, on some 
intoxicating autumn morning, after invigorating 
slumber, we feel strong enough to jump over the 
moon, and, casting about us for a barrier, a rock, a 
tree, or any object on which to measure our bodily 
prowess, we perform with perfect spontaneity feats 
which at another time might demand an almost im- 
possible exertion of muscle and of will. 

Both of these exertions are present in a vast class 
of actions. Exhausted with fatigue and wet and 
watching, the sailor on a wreck throws himself 
down to rest. But hardly are his limbs fairly re- 
laxed, when the order "to the pumps !" again sounds 
in his ears. Shall he, can he, obey it? Is it not 
better just to let his aching body lie, and let the ship 
go down if she will? So he lies on, till, with a des- 
perate heave of the will, at last he staggers to his 
legs, and to his task again. 

Again, there are instances where the volitional 
fiat demands great effort though the muscular ex- 
ertion be insignificant, e.g., the getting out of bed 
and bathing oneself on a cold morning. 

Finally, we may have the fiat in all its rigor, with 
no motor representation whatever involved, or one 
so remote as not to count directly at all in the men- 
tal motivation. 

Of the former class are all resolutions to be 
patient rather than to act. Such a one we have to 
make in the dentist's chair: The alternatives are 
a state of inward writhing, and mental swearing, 
coupled with spasmodic respiration, and all sorts of 

195 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 188 °1 

r. 

irregularly antagonistic muscular attractions — 
a state of shrinking and protest in a word, on the 
one hand; and on the other a state of muscular re- 
laxation and free breathing, a sort of mental wel- 
coming of the pain, and the elated consciousness 
that be it never so savage, we can stand it. This is 
a state of consent, and the passage from the former 
state to it, not the passage the other way, is in this 
instance the one requiring the fiat, and character- 
ized by the mental "click" of resolve. 

As examples of the last class, take Regulus return- 
ing to Carthage, the priest who decides to break 
with his church, the girl who makes up her mind to 
live single with her ideal, rather than accept the 
good old bachelor who is her only suitor, the em- 
bezzler who fixes a certain day on which to make 
public confession, the deliberate suicide, yea the 
wretch who after long hesitation resolves that he 
will put arsenic into his wife's cup. These pass 
through one moment which like a knife-edge parts 
all their past from all their future, but which leads 
to no immediate muscular consequences at all. 

Now if we analyze this great variety of cases, we 
shall find that the knife-edge moment where it ex- 
ists, has the same identical constitution in all. It 
is literally a fiat, a state of mind which consents, 
agrees, or is willing, that certain represented ex- 
periences shall continue to be, or should now for 
the first time become, part of Eeality. The consent 
comes after hesitation. The hesitation came because 
something made us imagine another alternative. 

196 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

When both alternatives are agreeable, as in the in- 
toxication of the mountain morning, or the liberum 
arMtrium indiffer entice, the hesitation is but mo- 
mentary; for either course is better than delay, 
and the one which lies nearest when the sense that 
we are uselessly delaying becomes pungent, is the 
one which discharges into act — thus no mental ten- 
sion has time to arise. 

But in other cases both alternatives are images 
of mixed good and evil. Whatever is done has to 
be done against some inhibitory agency, whether of 
intrinsic unpleasantness in the doing, or of rep- 
resented odiousness of the doing's fruits: the 
fiat has to occur against resistance. Volition 
then comes hand in hand with the sentiment of 
effort, and the proper problem of this essay lies 
before us. 

What does the effort seem to do? To bring the 
decisive volition. What is this volition? The 
stable victory of an idea, although it may be dis- 
agreeable, the permanent suppression of an idea 
although it may be immediately and urgently 
pleasant. 

What do we mean by "victory"? The survival in 
the mind in such form as to constitute unwavering 
contemplation, expectation, assent, or affirmation. 
What do we mean by "suppression"? Either com- 
plete oblivescence, or such presence as to evoke the 
steady sentiment of aversion or negation. 

Volition with effort is then incidental to the 
conflict of ideas of what our experience may be. 

197 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS ti880] 

Conflict involves those strange states or general at- 
titudes of feeling, which when we speak logically 
or intellectually, we call affirmation and negation, 
but when we speak emotionally, we call assent and 
refusal. Psychologically of course, like every other 
mental modification, these attitudes are feelings 
sui generis, not to be described, but only labelled 
and pointed out. What they are in se, what their 
conflict is, and what its decision and resolution are, 
we know in every given case introspectively with 
an absolute clearness that nothing can make clearer. 
But what forms of cerebral nerve-process corre- 
spond to these mind-processes is an infinitely darker 
matter, and one as to which I will here make no 
suggestion except the simple and obvious one that 
they and volition with them are subserved by the 
ideational centres exclusively and involve no down- 
ward irradiation into lower parts. The irradiation 
only comes when they are completed. 

In the dentist's chair, one idea is that of the man- 
liness of enduring the pain, the other is that of its 
intolerable character. We assent to the manliness, 
saying, "let it be the reality," and behold, it becomes 
so, though with a mental effort exactly proportion- 
ate to the sensitiveness of our nerves. To the sailor 
on the wreck, one idea is that of his sore hands, and 
the nameless aching exhaustion of his whole frame 
which further pumping involves. The other, is that 
of a hungry sea ingulfing him. He says: "rather 
the former!" and it becomes reality, in spite of the 
inhibiting influence of the comparatively luxurious 

198 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

sensations of the spot in which he for the moment 
lies. 

To the sinner in the agony of his mind, one idea 
is of the social shame and all the outward losses 
and degradations to which confession will expose 
him, the other is that of the rescue from the damned 
unending inward foulness to which concealment 
seems to doom him. He says to the confession, 
"■fiat I with all its consequences," and sure enough, 
when the time comes, fit, but not without mental 
blood and sweat. 

Everywhere the difficulty is the same : to keep 
affirming and adopting a state of mind of which dis- 
agreeableness is an integral factor. The disagree- 
ableness need not be of the nature of pain; it may 
be the merely relative disagreeableness of insipidity. 
When the spontaneous course of thought is to excit- 
ing images, whether sanguine or lugubrious, loving 
or revengeful, all reasonable representations come 
with a deadly flatness and coldness that strikes a 
chill to the soul. To cling to them however, as soon 
as they show their faces, to consent to their pres- 
ence, to affirm them, to negate all the rest, is the 
characteristic energy of the man whose will is 
strong. If on this purely mental plane his effort 
succeeds, the outward consequences will take care 
of themselves, for the representation will work un- 
aided its motor effects. The simplest cases are the 
best for illustrating the point, and in the case of a 
man afflicted with insomnia, and to whose body 
sleep comes through the persistent successful diver- 

199 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS V&M 

sion of the mind from the train of whirling 
thoughts, to the monotonous contemplation of one 
letter after another of a verse of poetry, spelled out 
synchronously with the acts of respiration, we have 
all the elements that can anywhere be found: a 
struggle of ideas, a victory of one set and certain 
bodily effects automatically consequent thereon. 
To sustain a representation, to think, is what re- 
quires the effort, and is the true moral act. Maniacs 
know their thoughts to be insane, but they are too 
pressing to be withstood. Again and again sober 
notions come, but like the sober instants of a 
drunken man, they are so sickeningly cadaverous, 
or else so still and small and imperceptible, that the 
lunatic can't bear to look them fully in the face and 
say : "let these alone represent my realities." Such 
an extract as this will illustrate what I mean : 

"A gentleman of respectable birth, excellent edu- 
cation, and ample fortune, engaged in one of the 
highest departments of trade . . . and being in- 
duced to embark in one of the plausible speculations 
of the day . . . was utterly ruined. Like other men 
he could bear a sudden overwhelming reverse better 
than a long succession of petty misfortunes, and 
the way in which he conducted himself on the occa- 
sion met with unbounded admiration from his 
friends. He withdrew, however, into rigid seclu- 
sion, and being no longer able to exercise the gener- 
osity and indulge the benevolent feelings which 
had formed the happiness of his life, made himself 
a substitute for them by daydreams, gradually fell 

200 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOET 

into a state of irritable despondency, from which 
he only gradually recovered with the loss of reason. 
He now fancied himself possessed of immense 
wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. 
He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and 
leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; 
converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where 
every* tale of distress attracts his notice, and being 
furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, 
he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends 
it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with 
a happy conviction that he has earned the right to 
a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table ; and 
yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old 
friends, he is quite conscious of his real position, 
but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he 
will not let himself believe it" 1 

Now to turn to the special case of the decision 
to make a muscular movement. This decision may 
require a volitional effort, or it may not. If I am 
well, and the movement is a light one (like the 
brushing of dust from my coat-sleeve), and suggests 
no consequences of an unpleasant nature, it is effort- 
less. But if unpleasant consequences are expected, 
that effective sustaining of the idea which results 
in bringing the motion about, and which is equiva- 
lent to mental consent that those consequences be- 
come real, involves considerable effort of volition. 
Now the unpleasant consequences may be immediate 
— my body may be weary, or the movement violent, 

1 The Duality of the Mind, by A. L. Wigan, M.D., p. 123. 
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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £1880] 

and involve a great amount of that general and 
special afferent feeling which we learned above to 
constitute muscular exertion. Under these circum- 
stances the idea of the movement is the imagination 
of these massively unpleasant feelings, and nothing 
else. The willing of the movement is the consent to 
these imagined feelings becoming real, — the saying 
of them, "fiant." The effort which the willing re- 
quires is the purely mental transition from the mere 
conception of the feelings to their expectation, 
steadfastly maintaining itself before the mind, dis- 
agreeable though it be. The motor idea, assuming 
at last this victorious status, not only uninhibited by 
remote associations, but inhibited no longer even by 
its own unpleasantness, discharges by the preap- 
pointed mechanism into the right muscles. Then 
the motor sensations accrue in all their expected 
severity, and the muscular effort as distinguished 
from the volitional effort has its birth. 

It is needless after this to say what absolutely 
different phenomena these two efforts are, or to 
expatiate upon the unfortunateness of their being 
confounded under the same generic name. Muscu- 
lar feelings whenever they are massive, and the 
body is not "fresh," are rather disagreeable, espe- 
cially when accompanied by stopped breath, con- 
gested head, bruised skin of fingers, toes, or shoul- 
ders, and strained joints. And it is only as thus 
disagreeable that the mind has difficulty in consent- 
ing to their reality. That they happen to be made 
real by our bodily activity is a purely accidental cir- 

202 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

cumstance. A soldier standing still to be fired at, 
expects disagreeable sensations engendered by bis 
bodily passivity. The action of his will, in consent- 
ing to the expectation, is identical with that of the 
sailor rising to go to the pumps. What is hard for 
both is facing an idea as real. 

The action of the will mnst not be limited to the 
willing of an act. To exert the will and to make 
soft muscles hard, are not one thing, but two en- 
tirely different things. Extremely frequent associa- 
tion may account for, but not excuse their confusion 
by the psychologist. The represented disagreeable- 
ness of a muscular motion may often be that which 
an exertion of will is called on to overcome; but 
as well might a cook, who daily associates the burn- 
ing of the fire with the boiling of the potatoes, define 
the inward essence of combustion as the making of 
hard potatoes soft. 

The action of the will is the reality of consent to 
a fact of any sort whatever, a fact in which we our- 
selves may play either an active or a suffering part. 
The fact always appears to us in an idea : and it is 
willed by its idea becoming victorious over inhibit- 
ing ideas, banishing negations, and remaining 
affirmed. The victorious idea is in every case what- 
soever built up of images of feelings afferent in their 
origin. And the first philosophical conclusion prop- 
erly so-called, into which our inquiry leads us, is a 
confirmation of the older sensationalist view that 
all the mind's materials without exception are de- 
rived from passive sensibility. Those who have 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1880 ^ 

thought that sensationalism abdicated its throne 
and mental spontaneity came in when Professor 
Bain admitted a "sensation of energy exerted by the 
outgoing stream/' have rejoiced in the wrong place 
altogether. There is a feeling of mental spontaneity, 
opposed in nature to all afferent feelings; but it 
does not, like the pretended feeling of muscular in- 
nervation, sit among them as among its peers. It is 
something which dominates them all, by simply 
choosing from their midst. It may reinforce either 
one in turn — a retinal image by attending to it, a 
motor image by willing it, a complex conception, 
like that of the world having a divine meaning, by 
believing it. Whatever mental material this ele- 
ment of spontaneity comes and perches on, is sus- 
tained, affirmed, selected from the rest ; though but 
for the feeling of spontaneous psychic effort, which 
thus reinforces it, we are conscious every moment 
that it might cease to be. The whole contrast of a 
priori and empirical elements in the mind lies, I am 
fully convinced, in this distinction. All our mind's 
contents are alike empirical. What is a priori is 
only their accentuation and emphasis. This greet- 
ing of the spirit, this acquiescence, connivance, par- 
tiality, call it what you will, which seems the in- 
ward gift of our selfhood, and no essential part of 
the feelings, to either of which in turn it may be 
given, — this psychic effort pure and simple, is the 
fact which a priori psychologists really have in mind 
when they indignantly deny that the whole intellect 
is derived from sense. 

204 



[1880] T HE FEELIXG OF EFFORT 



V. Xo Conscious Dynamic Connection between 
the Inner and Outer Worlds 

Xow if we take this psychic fact for just what on 
the face of it it seems to be, namely, the giving to an 
idea the full degree of reality it can have in and for 
the mind, we are led to a curious view of the re- 
lations between the inner and the outer worlds. 
The ideas, as mere representatives of possibility, 
seem set up midway between them to form a sort of 
atmosphere in which Eeality floats and plays. The 
mind can take any one of these ideas and make it its 
reality — sustain it, adopt it, adhere to it. But the 
mind's state will be Error, unless the outer force 
"backs" the same idea. If it backs it, the mind is 
cognitive of Truth; but whether in error, or in 
truth, the mind's espousal of the idea is called 
Belief. The outer force seems in no wise con- 
strained to back the mind's adoptions, except in one 
single kind of case, — where the idea is that of bodily 
movement. Here the outer force (with certain reser- 
vations) obeys and follows the mind's lead, agreeing 
to father as it were every child of that sort which 
the mind may conceive. And the act by which the 
mind thus takes the lead is called a Volition. 

The ideas backed by both parties are the Reality ; 
those backed by neither, or by the mind alone, form 
a residuum, a sort of limbo or no-man's land, of 
wasted fancies and aborted possibilities. 

But is it not obvious from this that the differ- 

205 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS E 188 °J 

ence between Belief and Volition is not intrinsic? 
What the mind does in both cases is the same. It 
takes an image, and says, "so far as I am concerned, 
let this stand ; let it be real for me." The behavior 
of the outer force is what makes all the difference. 
Generally constrained in the case of the motor voli- 
tion, it is independent in the case of the belief. It 
is true that volition may be impotent and belief 
delusive ; but be they however never so false or pow- 
erless, by their inward nature they are ejasdem 
farinaz, — beliefs and volitions still. 

Belief and Will are thus concerned immediately 
only with the relation between possibilities for the 
mind and realities for the mind. The notion of 
reality for the mind becomes thus the pivotal notion 
in the analysis of both. To analyze this notion itself 
seems at present an impossible task. Professor 
Bain has exerted his utmost powers upon it, but, to 
our mind, without avail ; and what J. S. Mill says 1 
still remains true, that when we arrive at the ele- 
ment which makes a belief differ from a mere con- 
ception, "we seem to have reached as it were, the 
central point of our intellectual nature, presup- 
posed and built upon in every attempt to explain the 
more recondite phenomena of our being." 

The sense of reality must then be postulated as 
an ultimate psychic fact. But we know that it may 
come with effort, or without, in the theoretic as well 

1 His edition of James Mill's Analysis, Vol. i, p. 423. 
Bain's reply is in the chapter on "Belief" in the 3d edition of 
his Emotions and Will. 

206 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

as in the motor sphere ; and the reader who has had 
the patience to follow onr study of effort as far as 
this, will not object to going on now to consider it 
in both spheres together. 

Hume said that to believe an idea was simply to 
have it in a lively manner. We, on our part, have 
seen the ideo-motor cases in which to will an idea 
is simply to have it. But a moment's reflection 
shows that such spontaneous belief and will are 
possible only where the mind's contents are at a 
minimum of complication. In the trance-subject's 
mind any simple suggestion will be both believed 
and acted on, because none of its usual associates 
are awakened. Bain 1 and Taine 2 have beautifully 
shown how in the normal subject all ideas taken 
per se are hallucinatory or held as true. Doubt 
never comes from any intrinsic insufficiency in a 
thought, but from the manner in which extrinsic 
ideas conflict with it, or in Taine's phrase, serve as 
its reductive. Before they come we have the primal 
state of theoretic and practical innocence. 

But wider suggestions bring the fall, and turn the 
simple credulity to doubt and the fearless spon- 
taneity to hesitation. A stable faith, a firm decree, 
can then only come after reflection, and be its 
fruits. What is reflection? A conflict between 
many ideas of possibility. During the conflict the 
sense of reality is lost or rather the connexion be- 
tween it and each of the ideas in turn. The conflict 

1 Emotions and Will, 3d Ed., pp. 511-517. 
2 De V Intelligence, Part i, Book ii, Chap. i. 

207 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 188 °1 

is over when the sense of reality returns, like the 
tempered steel, ten times more precious and invinci- 
ble for its icy bath in the waters of uncertainty. 
But why and how does it return? and why does it 
so often return with the symptom of effort by its 
side? Is it an independent entity which "merely 
took its flight at the first alarm of the battle, and 
which now with effort as its ally and affirmation at 
its right hand and negation at its left, comes back 
to give the victory to one idea? Or is it a simple 
resultant of the victory which was a foregone con- 
clusion decided by the intrinsic strength of the con- 
flicting ideas alone? 

We stand here in the presence of another mighty 
metaphysical problem. If the latter alternative be 
true there is no genuine spontaneity, no ambiguous 
power of decision, no real freedom either of faith 
or of act. The effort which seems to come and rein- 
force one side, endowing it with the feeling of 
reality, can be no new force adding itself to those 
already in the arena. It can only be a sort of eddy 
or derivative from their movement, whose sem- 
blance of independent form is illusory, and whose 
amount and direction are implicitly given the mo- 
ment they are posited. 

This has been the doctrine of powerful schools. 
The ideas themselves and their conflict have been 
held to constitute the total history of the mind, with 
no unaccounted-for phenomenon left over. Long 
before mutual inhibition by nerve processes had 
been discovered, the inhibitions and furtherances 

208 



[1880] THE FEELING OF EFFOKT 

of one idea by another, had by Herbart been erected 
into a completely elaborated system of psychic 
statics and dynamics. The English associationist 
school, without using the word inhibition, and in 
a much less outwardly systematic, though by no 
means less successful way, had also represented 
choice and decision as nothing but the resultant of 
different ideas failing to neutralize each other 
exactly. Doubt, fear, contradiction, curiosity, de- 
sire, assent, conviction, affirmation, negation and 
effort, are all alike, on this view, but collateral pro- 
duct, incidents of the form of equilibrium of the 
representations, as they pass from the oscillating 
to the stable state. 

This is of course conceivable; and to have the 
conception in a lively manner (as Hume says) 
may well in us, as in so many others, carry the sense 
of reality with it, and command conviction. But 
still the other alternative conflicts, and may reduce 
this conception to one of mere possibility, degrading 
it from a creed to an hypothesis. It seems im- 
possible, if our minds are in this open state, to 
find any crucial evidence which may decide. I shall, 
therefore, not pretend to dogmatize myself, but 
close this essay by a few considerations, which may 
give at least an appearance of liveliness to the alter- 
native notion, that the mental effort with which the 
affirmation of reality so often comes conjoined, may 
be an adventitious phenomenon, not wholly given 
and pre-determined by the ideas of whose struggle 
it accompanies the settlement. 

209 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 188 °J 

A little natural history becomes here necessary. 
When outer forces impinge upon a body we say that 
its resultant motion follows the line of least re- 
sistance, or of greatest traction. When we deliber- 
ately symbolize the mental drama in mechanical 
language, we also say that belief and will follow 
the lines of least resistance, or of most attractive 
motivation. But it is a curious fact that our spon- 
taneous language is by no means compatible with 
the law that mental action always follows lines of 
least resistance. Of course, if we proceed a priori 
and define the line of least resistance, as the line 
that is followed, the law must hold good. But in 
all hard cases either of belief or will, it seems to the 
agent as if one line were easier than another, and 
offered least resistance, even at the moment when 
the other line is taken. The sailor at the pumps, he 
who under the surgeon's knife represses cries of 
pain, or he who exposes himself to ostracism for 
duty's sake, feels as if he were following the line of 
greatest temporary resistance. He speaks of con- 
quering and overcoming his impulses and tempta- 
tions. 

But the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward, 
never talk of their conduct in that way or say they 
resist their energy, overcome their sobriety, con- 
quer their courage, and so forth. If in general we 
class all motives as sensual on the one hand and 
moral on the other, the sensualist never says of his 
behavior that it results from a victory over his 
conscience, but the moralist always speaks of his 

210 



[isso] the FEELING OF EFFORT 

as a victory over his appetite. The sensualist uses 
terms of inactivity, says he forgets his ideal, is 
deaf to duty, and so forth; which terms seem to 
imply that the moral motives per se can be annulled 
without energy or effort, and that the strongest 
mere traction lies in the line of the sensual impulse. 
The moral one appears in comparison with this, a 
still small voice which must be artificially rein- 
forced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, 
making things seem as if, while the sensual force 
were essentially a fixed quantity, the moral might 
be of various amount. But what determines the 
amount of the effort when by its aid moral force 
becomes victorious over a great sensual resistance? 
The very greatness of the resistance itself. If the 
sensual impulses are small, the moral effort is small. 
The latter is made great by the presence of a great 
antagonist to overcome. And if a brief defini- 
tion of moral action were required, none could be 
given which would better fit the appearances than 
this: It is action in the line of the greatest re- 
sistance. 

The facts may be most briefly symbolized thus, 
S standing for the sensual motive, M for the moral, 
and E for the effort : 

M per se <[ S. 
If + E > 18. 

In other words, if E adds itself to M, S immedi- 
ately offers the least resistance, and motion occurs 
in spite of it. 

211 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 188 °] 

But the E does not seem to form an integral part 
of the M. It appears adventitious and indeter- 
minate in advance. We can make more or less as we 
please, and if we make enough we can convert the 
greatest mental resistance into the least. 

Now the question whether this appearance of 
ambiguity is illusory or real, is the question of the 
freedom of the will. Many subtle considerations 
may be brought to prove that the amount of effort 
which a moral motive comports as its ally, is a fixed 
function of the motive itself, and like it, determined 
in advance. On the other hand, there is the notion 
of an absolute ambiguity in the being of this thing, 
and its amount, sun-clear to the consciousness of 
each of us. He who loves to balance nice doubts 
and probabilities, need be in no hurry to decide. 
Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, 
"dazu hast du noch erne lange Frist" for from 
generation to generation the evidence for both sides 
will grow more voluminous, and the question more 
exquisitely refined. But if his speculative delight is 
less keen, if the love of a parti pris outweighs that 
of keeping questions open, or if, as a French philoso- 
pher of genius 1 says, "Famour de la vie qui s'in- 
digne de tant de discours" awakens in him, craving 
the sense of either peace or power ; then taking the 
risk of error on his head, he must project upon one 
of the alternatives in his mind, the attribute of 
reality for him. The present writer does this for 
the alternative of freedom. May the reader derive 

1 J. Lequier : La Recherche d'une Premiire Verity, 1865, p. 90. 
212 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFOKT 

no less contentment if he prefer to take the opposite 
course ! 

Only one further point remains, but that is an 
important one philosophically. There is no com- 
moner remark than this, that resistance to our mus- 
cular effort is the only sense which makes us aware 
of a reality independent of ourselves. The reality re- 
vealed to us in this experience takes the form of a 
force like the force of effort which we ourselves 
exert, and the latter after a certain fashion serves 
to measure. 1 This force we do not similarly exert 
when we receive tactile, auditory, visual, and other 
impressions, so the same reality cannot be revealed 
by those passive senses. 

Of course if the foregoing analysis be true, such 
reasoning falls to the ground. The "muscular 
sense" being a sum of afferent feelings is no more a 
"force-sense" than any other sense. It reveals to us 
hardness and pressure as they do colour, taste, 
smell, sonority, and the other attributes of the 
phenomenal world. To the naive consciousness all 
these attributes are equally objective. To the criti- 
cal all equally subjective. The physicist knows 
nothing whatever of force in a non-phenomenal 
sense. Force is for him only a generic name for all 
those things which will cause motion. A falling 

1 See for example, Psychology [presumably Spencer's. Ed.], 
Part VII., Chaps. XVI. and XVII. ; Herschel's Familiar Lec- 
tures, Lecture XII. ; an article on "the Force behind Nature," 
by Dr. Carpenter, reprinted in the Popular Science Monthly for 
March, 1880 ; Martineau's Review of Bain ; Hansel's Meta- 
physics, pp. 105, 346. 

213 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1880] 

stone, a magnet, a cylinder of steam, a man, just as 
they appear to sense, are forces. There is no super- 
sensible force in or behind them. Their force is 
just their sensible pull or push, if we take them 
naturally, and just their positions and motions if 
we take them scientifically. If we aspire to strip 
off from Nature all anthropomorphic qualities, there 
is none we should get rid of quicker than its 
"Force." How illusory our spontaneous notions of 
force grow when projected into the outer world 
becomes evident as soon as we reflect upon the phe- 
nomenon of muscular contraction. In pure objec- 
tive dynamic terms (i.e., terms of position and 
motion ) , it is the relaxed state of the muscle which 
is the state of stress and tension. In the act of con- 
traction, on the contrary, the tension is resolved, 
and disappears. Our feeling about it is just the 
other way, — which shows how little our feeling has 
to do with the matter. 

The subject has an interest in connection with the 
free-will controversy. It is an admitted mechanical 
principle that the resultant movement of a system 
of bodies linked together in definite relations of 
energy, may vary according to changes in their 
collocation, brought about by moving them at right 
angles to their pre-existing movements; which 
changes will not interfere with the conservation of 
the system's energy, as they perform work upon it. 
Certain persons desiring to harmonize free will 
with the theory of conservation, have used this con- 
ception to symbolize the dynamic relations of will 

214 



[1880] the FEELING OF EFFORT 

with brain, by saying that the mental effort merely 
determines the moment and the spot at which a 
certain molecular vis viva shall start, by a sort of 
rectangular pressure which plays the part of an 
independent variable in the equations of movement 
required by the principles of conservation. Thus 
free will may be conceived without any of the in- 
ternal energy of the system being either augmented 
or destroyed. 

Now so long as mental effort in general was sup- 
posed to have a particular connection with mus- 
cular effort, and so long as muscular effort was sup- 
posed to reveal to us behind the resistance of bodies, 
a "force" which they contained, there was a ready 
reply to all this speculation. Your will, it could be 
said, is doing "work" upon the system. "Work" is 
denned in mechanics as movement done against re- 
sistance, and your will meets with a resistance 
which it has to overcome by moral effort. Were the 
molecular movements brought about by the will, 
rectangular to pre-existing movements, they would 
not resist, and the volition would be effortless. But 
the volition involves effort, and since, according to 
the will-muscle-force-sense theory, its effort is an 
inner force which overcomes a real outer force, 
since, indeed, without this antagonism we should be 
without the notion of outer force altogether, why 
then the effort, if free, must be an absolutely new 
contribution and creation so far as the sum of 
cosmic energy is concerned. The only alternative 
then (if one still held to the will-muscle-force-sense 

215 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 188 °l 

theory) was either with Sir John Herschel, 1 frankly 
to avow that "force" may be created anew, and that 
"conservation" is only an approximate law ; or else 
to drop free-will in favor of conservation, and sup- 
pose the ego, in willing, to be merely cognitively 
conscious, in the midst of the universal force-stream, 
of certain currents with which it was mysteriously 
fated to identify itself. 

To my mind all such discussions rest on an an- 
thropomorphization of outward force, which is to 
the last degree absurd. Outward forces, so far as 
they are anything, are masses in certain positions, 
or in certain movements, and nought besides. The 
muscular "force-sense" reveals to us nothing but 
hardness and pressure, which are subjective sensa- 
tions, like warmth or pain. The moral effort is 
not transitive between the inner and the outer 
worlds, but is put forth upon the inner world 
alone. Its point of application is an idea. Its 
achievement is "reality for the mind," of that idea. 
That, when the idea is realized, the corresponding 
nerve tracts should be modified, and so de proche 
en prodie, the muscles contract, is one of those 
harmonies between inner and outer worlds, before 
which our reason can only avow its impotence. If 
our reason tries to interpret the relation as a 
dynamic one, and to conceive that the neural modi- 
fication is brought about by the idea shoving the 
molecules of the ganglionic matter sideways from 
their course, well and good! Only we had better 

1 Loc. cit., p. 468. 

216 



[1880] T HE FEELING OF EFFORT 

assume ourselves unconscious of the dynamism. 
We are unconscious of the molecules as such, and of 
our lateral push as such. Why should we be con- 
scious of the "force" as such, by which the mole- 
cules resist the push? They are one thing, and the 
consciousness which they subserve is always an idea 
of another thing. The only resistance which the 
force of consciousness feels or can feel, is the resist- 
ance which the idea makes to being consented to as 
real. 

Conclusions 

1. Muscular effort, properly so called, and mental 
effort, properly so called, must be distinguished. 
What is commonly known as "muscular exertion" 
is a compound of the two. 

2. The only feelings and ideas connected with 
muscular motion are feelings and ideas of it as 
effected. Muscular effort proper is a sum of feel- 
ings in afferent nerve tracts, resulting from motion 
being effected. 

3. The pretended feeling of efferent innervation 
does not exist — the evidence for it drawn from 
paralysis of single eye muscles, vanishing when we 
take the position of the sound eye into account. 

4. The philosophers who have located the human 
sense of force and spontaneity in the nexus between 
the volition and the muscular contraction, making 
it thus join the inner and the outer worlds, have 
gone astray. 

5. The point of application of the volitional ef- 

217 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1880 l 

fort always lies within the inner world, being an 
idea or representation of afferent sensations of some 
sort. From its intrinsic nature or from the pres- 
ence of other ideas, this representation may spon- 
taneously tend to lapse from vivid and stable con- 
sciousness. Mental effort may then accompany its 
maintenance. That (being once maintained) it 
should by the connection between its cerebral seat 
and other bodily parts, give rise to movements in 
the so-called voluntary muscles, or in glands, ves- 
sels, and viscera, is a subsidiary and secondary mat- 
ter, with which the psychic effort has nothing 
immediately to do. 

6. Attention, belief, affirmation, and motor vo- 
lition are thus four names for an identical process, 
incidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival 
of one in spite of the opposition of others. 

7. The surviving idea is invested with a sense of 
reality which cannot at present be further analyzed. 

8. The question whether, when its survival in- 
volves the feeling of effort, this feeling is deter- 
mined in advance or absolutely (ambiguous and 
matter of chance as far as all the other data are 
concerned, is the real question of the freedom of the 
will, and explains the strange intimateness of the 
feeling of effort to our personality. 

9. To single out the sense of muscular resistance 
as the "force sense" which alone can make us ac- 
quainted with the reality of an outward world is 
an error. We cognize outer reality by every sense. 
The muscular makes us aware of its hardness and 

218 



[issoj T he FEELING OF EFFORT 

pressure, just as other afferent senses make us aware 
of its other qualities. If they are too anthropo- 
morphic to be true, so is it also. 

10. The ideational nerve tracts alone are the seat 
of the feeling of mental effort. It involves no dis- 
charge downward into tracts connecting them with 
lower executive centres ; though such discharge may 
follow upon the completion of the nerve processes 
to which the effort corresponds. 



219 



XIV 

THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS IN 
DEAF-MUTES * 

[1882] 

Prevented by outward circumstances from com- 
pleting an investigation into the above subject 
which I would willingly have made more thor- 
ough, I publish the facts I have already obtained, 
in the hope that some one with better opportunities 
may carry on the work. The regular medical at- 
tendants of deaf-mute institutions seem particularly 
well fitted for such a task. 

So far as I can make out, the immunity from 
dizziness which is characteristic of deaf-mutes has 
never been remarked or commented on before, even 
at asylums. Another illustration of how few facts 
"experience'' will discover unless some prior inter- 
est, born of theory, is already awakened in the mind. 

The modern theory, that the semicircular canals 
are unconnected with the sense of hearing, but serve 
to convey to us the feeling of movement of our head 
through space, a feeling which, when very intensely 

[* Reprinted from American Journal of Otology, 1882, 4, 239- 
254. This article is briefly mentioned in the Principles (1890), 
Vol. II., p. 89, note. Ed.] 

220 



[18S2] THE SEXSE OF DIZZINESS 

excited, passes into that of vertigo or dizziness, is 
well known. 1 It occurred to me that deaf-mute 
asylums ought to offer some corroboration of the 
theory in question, if a true one. Among their in- 
mates must certainly be a considerable number in 
whom either the labyrinths or the auditory nerves 
in their totality have been destroyed by the same 
causes that produced the deafness. We ought there- 
fore to expect, if the semicircular canals be really 
the starting-points of the sensation of dizziness, to 
find, on examining a large number of deaf-mutes, 
a certain proportion of them who are completely 
insusceptible of that affection, and others who en- 
joy immunity in a less complete degree. 

The number of deaf-mutes who have been ex- 
amined to test this suggestion is in all 519. Of 
these 186 are reported as totally insusceptible of 
being made dizzy by whirling rapidly round with 
the head in any position whatever. 2 Xearly 200 

1 For the benefit of possible readers who may not be physiol- 
ogists I would say that a summary of the evidence for this view 
is given in Foster's Text-book of Physiology. Book III., Chap. 
VI., § 2. An attack on this theory has recently been made by 
Baginski, a very full abstract of whose article appeared in the 
number of this Journal for last January. Baginski's experi- 
ments seem to me far from conclusive; and his argument has 
been satisfactorily replied to by Hogyes in Pfhiger's Arcliiv, 
Vol. XXVI., page 558, and by Spamer, ibid., Vol. XXV., page 177. 
[For bibliography, cf. J. Byrne, Physiology of the Semicircular 
Canals and their Relation to Seasickness, 1912. Cf. also James's 
"A Suggestion for the Prevention of Seasickness," Boston Medi- 
cal and Surgical Journal. 1887, 116, 490-491. Ed.] 

8 It is well known that with the head leaning forward or 
backward, or towards one shoulder, the dizziness is much more 
intense. 

221 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1882 1 

students and instructors in Harvard College were 
examined for purposes of comparison, and but a 
single one remained exempt from the vertigo. Of 
the deaf-mutes, 134 are set down as dizzy in a very 
slight degree ; while 199 were normally, and in a few 
cases abnormally, sensitive. 

The surmise with which I started is thus proved, 
and the theory that the semicircular canals are 
organs of equilibrium receives renewed corrobora- 
tion. 

Of course the cases observed represent every kind 
of ear disease, and it is impossible to analyze them 
so as to show why exemption from vertigo should 
be associated with the deafness in one case and in 
another not. "Congenital" mutes are found in all 
three classes, and so are "semi-mutes," so that the 
age at which the deafness comes on has nothing 
to do with it. The diseases which are the most 
fertile causes of deafness, meningitis, scarlet fever, 
typhoid fever, etc., are as apt to leave the patient's 
sensibility to vertigo normal as they are to abolish 
it. 

The cases from which the above aggregate con- 
clusions are drawn are from several distinct 
sources: the Hartford Asylum; the National Col- 
lege at Washington, and its primary department; 
the Horace Mann School in Boston; the Clarke In- 
stitution at Northampton ; the Indiana Institution ; 
the answers to a printed circular I distributed, and 
a number of separate voluntary reports I received. 
In tabular form the statistics run as follows : 

222 



[1882] THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 



Institution. 


Not dizzy. 


Slightly. 


Dizzy. 


National College .... 


18 


5 


38 


Its Primary Department . 


11 


1 


19 


Hartford 


49 


49 


57 


Boston 


45 


20 


4 


Northampton 


35 


30 


20 


Indiana 


6 


6 


4 


Circulars 


28 


19 


46 


Various 


4 


4 


11 




186 


134 


199 



Total, 519 cases. 1 

The same case was often reported through more 

than one channel. I have tried as well as I could, 

though I fear without perfect success, to eliminate 

these reduplications. As regards the accuracy of 

the reports, there is this to be said. Among normal 

people it is well known how individuals differ in 

their sensitiveness to whirling about or swinging. 

The cases marked "slight" may possibly therefore 

fall within the normal limits. It is more probable 

however that the majority of them represent a more 

or less abnormally reduced susceptibility. In the 

1 1 add the following communication in a note because it is 
less exactly reported, and the observations were perhaps made 
more cursorily than those set down in the text. Mr. Fosdick, 
of the Institution at Danville, Ky., writes in March, 1881 : "I 
selected twenty boys about half of whom had been born deaf, 
the other half had lost hearing. ... I applied to them our 
test in the three ways. . . . With those who had lost hearing 
from disease the result was uniform. No dizziness could be 
produced. . . . With those who had been born deaf the results 
were equally uniform. A few seconds of spinning were in most 
cases sufficient to produce dizziness." 

223 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1882 ] 

cases I myself examined, every one where the pres- 
ence of vertigo was at all doubtful was recorded as 
"slight/' so as not to overload the column of figures 
favorable to my hypotheses. In the Harvard Col- 
lege records, in which each man inscribed his own 
result, the expressions "slightly" and "somewhat" 
occur, but they do so very few times indeed. Where 
the vertigo was slight, it has often happened that 
a deaf-mute examined one day or by one person 
was reported "not dizzy," whilst another day or 
another examiner caused the case to be recorded 
either as "slightly dizzy" or as "dizzy." I am dis- 
posed to think that both normal and abnormal sub- 
jects differ somewhat in their sensibility to vertigo 
from one day to another. Lowenfeld 1 says that this 
is markedly the case with the vertigo induced by 
galvanic currents across the head, of which I shall 
have something to say anon. 

A certain lack of rigorous accuracy in individual 
instances ought then to throw no discredit whatever 
on the main result of the investigation, which is 
that disease of the internal ear is likely to confer 
immunity from dizziness. Nobody could possibly 
confound the extreme cases, nor could any differ- 
ence of opinion arise concerning them. We see on 
the one hand an affection which may nauseate the 
patient or make it impossible for him to stand on his 
feet at all ; on the other, absolute and total indiffer- 
ence to the whirling in every respect whatsoever. 

1 Exp. u. krit. Untersuch. zur Electr other apie des Gehirns, 
Munclieii, 1881. 

224 



[1882] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

As regards the method of examination, active 
spinning about on the feet with the head succes- 
sively upright, bent forward, and inclined on one 
shoulder, is of course the simplest way of testing 
the matter. The eyes must be closed to eliminate 
optical vertigo pure and simple, but opened when 
the spinning is over, so that the patient may have 
every advantage for walking straight. Except in 
the Boston and Northampton Schools this was the 
method generally used. It is likely to give an un- 
duly small number of total exemptions, from the 
fact that if the whirling has been long and violent, 
some feeling of confusion will remain for a few mo- 
ments as a consequence of head congestion, and 
some irregularity of gait as a consequence of in- 
voluntary continuance of muscular action. This 
latter may be called muscular vertigo — it probably 
figures in many of the cases marked "slight." 

The muscular vertigo may be entirely eliminated 
by passive rotation. The children of the Boston 
and Northampton Schools were seated on a square 
board, each angle whereof had a rope affixed to it. 
The ropes were kept parallel up to a height above 
the head of the inmate by a cross-shaped brace of 
wood which kept them asunder at that point. Above 
the cross-brace they rapidly converged to the point 
of suspension of the apparatus. The apparatus is 
rotated by the examiner's hands till the ropes above 
the brace are tightly twisted. The child is then 
seated on the board, with closed eyes, and head in 
any position desired, and the torsion of the ropes is 

225 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 1882 J 

left to work its effects freely. These consist in a 
rapid revolution of the whole apparatus, including 
its inmate. The moment the speed of rotation slack- 
ens, the examiner stops the rotation, and sets the 
child, who has been instructed previously, to open 
his eyes and walk as straight as possible towards 
a distant point on the floor. I examined all the 
Northampton children myself in this way, and 
(with my brother's assistance) repeated thus the 
examinations made of the children of the Horace 
Mann School by their teachers a year before. 1 
The Harvard students were also examined in 
this way. 

It is difficult to be sure, in many of the cases 
marked "slightly dizzy," whether the sensation ex- 
perienced by the subject was a mild degree of true 
vertigo, or a slight confusion arising from the ef- 
fects of centrifugal movement of the intracranial 
fluids and viscera. That changes of intracranial 
pressure will give rise to dizziness by directly in- 
fluencing the brain independently of the semicir- 

1 In a preliminary report of these inquiries published in the 
Harvard University Bulletin No. 18 (1881), the figures are dif- 
ferent from those I give here. The differences are due to later 
observations. I regret very much that, owing to a rather in- 
comprehensible degree of thoughtlessness, it never occurred to 
me to test the pupils' sense of rotation after the original Crum- 
Brown and Mach method; that is, to seat them in the swing 
with closed eyes, to rotate it gently through a comparatively 
small number of degrees, and to see how accurately they could 
afterwards assign the direction and amount of rotation. It 
is to be hoped that any one repeating the observations will not 
leave this one out. We should expect that non-dizzy deaf-mutes 
would be quite unaware of the rotation if it were absolutely 
frictionless and slow. 

226 



[1882] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

cular canals is evident from the number of sub- 
jects who are of reduced sensibility as respects 
dizziness from whirling, but who say that they feel 
dizzy when their head is suddenly raised from a 
bent position, or when they get up after stooping 
to the ground. In reply to a question in the circu- 
lar, "Do you ever experience dizziness under any 
other circumstances?" [than whirling] two of the 
"not dizzy" class, six of the "slightly dizzy" class, 
and five of the "dizzy" class speak of experiencing 
this feeling. 

In the light of all these facts it became an inter- 
esting question to ascertain whether the dizziness 
produced by galvanic currents through the head be 
due to irritation of the vertigo centres themselves 
or of their peripheral organ the semicircular canals. 
Hitzig, as is well known, made a careful study of 
these phenomena on normal persons; it may be 
found in his "Untersuchungen iiber das Geliirn." 
With its theoretical conclusions it is impossible to 
agree. The objective facts, however, which I be- 
lieve he first accurately analyzed, are these : If the 
subjects' eyes are open they move slowly towards 
the side of the anode when the current is strong, 
then rapidly recover themselves by a quick move- 
ment towards the side of the kathode. At the same 
time the world appears to swim towards the kath- 
ode, and the head and body inclined over towards 
the anode. 

At the Northampton School we tested forty-three 
pupils with a galvanic current strong enough to 

227 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1882 1 

make four normal adults, on whom it was tried, 
bend body and head strongly over. Of twenty-three 
deaf-mutes of the "not dizzy" class, only five showed 
this phenomenon. Of twenty pupils of the "dizzy" 
class ("slight" cases were not tried) fourteen 
showed it in a greater or less degree. At the Bos- 
ton School the girls became so nervous that the few 
results I obtained with them were valueless. Of the 
boys, fifteen "not dizzy" cases were tried, and but 
one swayed towards the anode. Three "slight" 
cases were tried ; one swayed, the other two did not. 
One "quite dizzy" case had the current passed, but 
did not sway. 

With respect to the subjective feelings accom- 
panying the current's passage, they are so numer- 
ous and often so intense that a deaf-mute child 
experiencing them for the first time can hardly 
be expected to give a very lucid account of them. 
Stinging of the skin over the mastoid processes, 
subjective noises (often very loud), flashes before 
the eyes, strange cerebral confusion, are prominent 
among them. Nevertheless, it seemed evident that 
many of the patients whose body did not sway at 
all and whose eyes showed no perceptible nystag- 
mus, did have some sort of a vertiginous feeling, 
which they expressed by moving the hand wavingly 
across the forehead, by saying they were "dizzy" 
or felt like "falling." I regard the experiments, 
therefore, as almost inconclusive. To be of value 
they should be repeated many times with the same 
subjects on different days, and with non-polarizable 

228 



[1882] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

electrodes fastened by a spring arc behind the ears, 
so as to follow the head in its movements without 
modifying the contact. The current should also 
be measured, which was not done accurately in the 
above cases. 

Taken as they stand, all I feel like saying of them 
is that they make it appear not improbable that 
both the vertigo centre and its peripheral organ are 
galvanically excitable; but that the peripheral or- 
gan is much more sensitive to the current than is 
the centre. There was certainly a marked differ- 
ence of demeanor, on the whole, between the "dizzy" 
and the "not dizzy" pupils of the Northampton 
School, when under the current, even though in 
many cases the difference were only one of degree. 

In view of the great probability that seasickness 
is due to an overexcitement of the organs of vertigo, 
propagated to the cerebellum or whatever other 
"centres" of nausea there may be, I inquired of 
many deaf-mutes whether they had been exposed to 
rough weather at sea and suffered in the usual way. 
The majority, of course, had not been exposed. Fif- 
teen of the "not dizzy" or "scarcely dizzy" classes 
had been exposed, and of these not one had been 
seasick. This, it is true, is negative evidence, and 
might easily be upset by two or three cases of ex- 
emption from dizziness with susceptibility to sea- 
seasick. This, it is true, is negative evidence, and 

1 1 have three such possible counter-cases, but in all the record 
is so imperfect (and no address being given further inquiry 
cannot be made) that they cannot be used. To question 8 in 
the circular, "Have you been exposed to seasickness and been 

229 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS E 1882 l 

sumption that non-dizzy deaf-mutes may, ipso facto, 
enjoy immunity from seasickness. And it suggests 
the application of small blisters behind the ears as 
a possible counter-irritant to that excitement of 
the organs beneath, in which that most intolerable 
of all complaints may take its rise. 1 

Perhaps the most interesting of all the results to 
which our inquiries have led is the following. A 
certain number of non-dizzy deaf-mutes when 
plunged under water seem to be affected by an in- 
describable alarm and bewilderment, which only 
ceases when they find their heads above the surface. 
Every one who has lost himself in the woods, or 
wakened in the darkness of the night to find the 
relation of his bed's position relatively to the doors 
and windows of his room forgotten, knows the alto- 
gether peculiar discomfort and anxiety of such 
"disorientation" in the horizontal plane. In ordi- 
nary life, however, the sense of what is the vertical 
direction is never lost. Even with eyes closed, and 
the "static" sense, as Brewer calls it, of the semi- 
circular canals lost, gravity exerts its never-ceasing 

seasick since losing your hearing?" one, forty- two years old, 
not dizzy, replies, "Yes, but once in my childhood." Another, 
slightly dizzy, thirty-nine years old, deaf at thirteen years, 
says, "Was greatly nauseated by my first ride in the rail cars 
when fourteen years old." The third, not dizzy, w T rites, "Was 
on a coast steamer for three days out of sight of land in a 
storm; felt slightly uncomfortable in state-room, but was all 
right in the open air of the deck." The state-room sickness 
may have been due to smell. 

[* Of. the author's "A Suggestion for the Prevention of Sea- 
sickness," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1887, 116, 490- 
491. Ed.] 

230 



[1882] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

influence on onr limbs, and tells us where the ground 
is and where the zenith, no matter what our move- 
ments may be. "So shakes the magnet, and so stands 
the pole." Helmholtz, who wrote his Optics before 
the semicircular canal sense was discovered, as- 
cribes much of the seasick vertigo to the sufferer's 
sense of the direction of gravity being thrown out 
of gear : "One feels the traction of gravity [on board 
ship] now apparently to the right, now to the left, 
now forwards and now backwards, because one is 
no longer able to find [with his eyes] the direction 
of the vertical. Only after long practice, as I can 
myself testify, does one come to use gravity as an 
exclusive means of orientation, and only then does 
the vertigo cease." * 

But imagine a person without even the sense of 
gravity to guide him, and the "disorientation" ought 
to be complete, — a sort of bewilderment concerning 
his relations to his environment in all three dimen- 
sions will ensue, to which ordinary life offers abso- 
lutely no parallel. Now this case seems realized 
when a non-dizzy deaf-mute dives under water with 

1 Physiol. Optik, page 664. One of my colleagues, an eminent 
geologist, with a good topographical instinct, tells me that 
whenever he "loses his bearings" in the country, he becomes 
nauseated. I myself became distinctly nauseated one night 
after trying for a long time to imagine the right position of my 
bed in the dark, it having been changed a day or two previous. 
These facts seem to show that a purely ideal excitement of 
images of "direction," when strong and confused, such images 
being probably faint repetitions of semicircular canal feelings, 
may engender precisely the same physical consequences as 
would an equally strong and confused excitement of the canals 
themselves. 

231 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1882 l 

his eyes closed. He hears nothing (except perhaps 
subjective roaring) ; sees nothing; his semicircular 
canal sense tells him nothing of motion up or down, 
right or left, or round about ; the water presses on 
his skin equally in each direction; he is literally 
cut off from all knowledge of their relations to outer 
space, and ought to suffer the maximum possible de- 
gree of bewilderment to which in his mundane life 
a creature can attain. 

I have received information bearing on this point, 
and distinct enough to be quoted, from thirty-three 
cases in all. Curious exceptions occur which I 
cannot understand, and which I will presently state. 
Meanwhile here are some extracts from my corre- 
spondents' replies which show the condition above 
described to be no fiction. Prof. Samuel Porter of 
the College at Washington, from whom I have de- 
rived most of my information on this point, says, 
"I am told it is the case with some deaf-mutes that 
they sometimes find a difficulty in rising after a dive 
from uncertainty as to up and down." 

L. G. (not dizzy) writes: 

"A year after I lost my hearing, on a day when the 
sun was shining brightly, I dove from a high place, and 
immediately after entering the water had no knowledge 
of locality. In what direction the top was I could not 
determine, and it was the same as respects the bottom. 
I endured agonies in searching for the surface. At 
last, when I had given up all hope, my head was for- 
tunately at the surface, and I was soon master of the 
situation. I was told that I had been swimming on 
the surface with the back of my head sometimes out 

232 



[1882] THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

of water, and at other times completely immersed. 
For years I could not summon up courage to dive again. 
I never feel at my ease under water." 1 

W. H. (scarcely dizzy) writes: 

"Since I became deaf it has been difficult to control 
myself under water. . . . When I undertake to dive 
into the water I immediately lose all control over my 
movements, and cannot tell which way is up or which 
is down. . . . Once I struck against something, but I 
am not able to say whether it was the bottom of the 
river or the steep rocks near the shore." 

A. S. L. (not dizzy) : 

"If I get my head under water it is impossible for 
me to tell which is the top or bottom of the river or 
pond, and there is a great roaring and buzzing in my 
head." 

G. M. T. (not dizzy) : 

"Before I lost my hearing I was a good diver, but 
after that time I could never trust my head under 
water." 

M. C. (not dizzy) : 

"Difficult to swim or dive without being frightened 
terribly. ... I generally close eyes till under water, 
then open them till top is reached. If eyes are kept 
closed I become confused." 

J. L. H. (doubtfully dizzy) : 

"It is very seldom that any deaf-mute can escape 
drowning when his head has got under water. Persons 
with such heads as mine are rendered unable to come 
out of the water in the right direction." 

1 Says eyes were closed. 

233 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1882 ^ 

J. C. B. (not dizzy) : 

"Dare not go under water at all unless by day and 
with eyes open. . . . Must keep the eyes open. Im- 
possible to swim in the dark." 

C. S. D. (not dizzy) : 

"Can't dive at all. As soon as water gets in my eyes, 
I can't get them open; get confused, and do not know 
whether I am standing on my head or my feet." 

A. B. (not dizzy) : 

"Gets perfectly bewildered under water. Dives with 
closed eyes." 

C. P. F. (not dizzy) : 

"I undertook on one occasion to turn a summersault 
in water only two feet deep. It was done in such a way 
that I came down on my hands and knees on the bottom 
with my head under water. Instantly I seemed to be 
in water fathoms deep, facing a cliff which I was 
trying to climb up with my hands and feet. I pawed 
and pawed but could not rise, neither could I sink. 
There was no sensation to prove to me that I was in a 
horizontal position; every sensation was that of stand- 
ing upright in water above my head. It seemed hours 
before I could climb that cliff, though it was only a 
second or two before my pawing brought me into 
water so shallow that my head appeared above the sur- 
face. Instantly the sensation of being in an upright 
position vanished, and I felt myself to be where I really 
was, on my hands and knees in the water." 

Of this class of cases there are fifteen out of the 
thirty-three. The remaining ten "not dizzy" say 
they can dive perfectly well. Two of them report 
that they do so equally well with eyes closed or 

234 



[1882] THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

open, and of two others Professor Porter sends me 
the same account. Of the residual eight there are 
five normal as respects dizziness. One complains 
of losing equilibrium, another of turning giddy, a 
third of "not knowing which way I am going/' a 
fourth of "losing presence of mind/' the fifth of 
having "lost power of directing movements." 
Closer inquiry of this last case showed that the per- 
plexity only ha}3pened once, and that its cause was 
then the bright sunshine on the bottom of the bath- 
ing-tank which he mistook for the light of the sky. 1 

Finally three cases, "slightly dizzy/' complain of 
noises in the ears, and peculiar feelings which make 
diving difficult of performance. 

Obviously the conditions are very complicated. 
In the eight last cases the symptoms might be due 
(in all but the fifth) to the entrance of water 
through a perforated tympanum. This is well 
known to cause both dizziness and roaring, but the 
presence of tympanic perforation in the subjects in 
question is unknown. It is impossible to say 
whether some of the "bewilderment" of the first 
fourteen may not be due to this cause, but as they 
report themselves "not dizzy" to whirling, this 
seems in the main unlikely. 

The intermediate class of ten "not dizzy," four of 
whom we know to be able to dive with closed eyes 

lr The same cause seems to have increased the bewilderment 
of Mr. L. G. on the occasion described in the first quotation 
above (page 232). He informs Professor Porter that he always 
keeps his eyes open under water, and that they were open on 
that occasion. He speaks of the sun shining brightly. 

235 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1882 1 

without being bewildered, is the hardest to deal 
with, and threatens even to upset our pretty little 
theory. The only reason why we do not immedi- 
ately confess that it does so is the suspicion (always 
possible) of some error in the report, which a mi- 
nute personal examination would reveal. I can 
therefore only hand the matter over to those with 
opportunities for investigation, as an as yet un- 
solved mystery upon which it is to be hoped they 
may throw some farther light. 

A noteworthy fact (which shall be immediately 
explained) is that the non-dizzy patients who got 
bewildered under water were all more or less af- 
flicted with ataxia or some other disorder of move- 
ment. A natural explanation of their trouble would 
then be that they had simply lost control of their 
limbs for swimming movements. This may be true 
of some : two report trouble under water soon after 
loss of hearing, but not now, the ataxia having 
meanwhile improved. But the ten non-dizzy who 
can dive happen also all to be ataxic. So that 
ataxia per se cannot be held to be an all-sufficient 
reason for the phenomenon in question. 

The reason for the great predominance of loco- 
motor disorders in the persons who answered my 
circulars is this : one of the first things I discovered 
on beginning my inquiries was the fact, notorious at 
deaf and dumb institutions but apparently not 
much known to the outer world, that large numbers 
of deaf-mutes stagger and walk zigzag, especially 
after dark, and are unable to stand steady with 

236 



[1SS2] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

their eyes closed. To such deaf -mutes as these were 
most of my circulars purposely seut. I do uot refer 
to the awkward gait and shuffling of the feet which 
are so commonly exhibited at asylums. 1 but to a 
real difficulty in controlling their equilibrium. Con- 
genital deaf-mutes appear hardly ever to show this 
peculiarity. I have only heard of two or three cases 
of their doing so. The bulk of those that stagger 
were made deaf by scarlet fever or some form of 
meningeal inflammation. When the facts first be- 
gan to come in I naturally thought that the stag- 
gering, 2 which usually improves in course of time. 
might be due to the loss of the afferent sense most 
used in locomotor muscular co-ordination, suppos- 
ing the semicircular canal feelings to constitute 
this afferent sense. In the preliminary note pub- 
lished in the Harvard University Bulletin, I wrote 
as follows : 

"The evidence I already have in hand justifies the 
formation of a tentative hypothesis, as follows : The 
normal guiding sensation in locomotion is that 
from the semicircular canals. This is co-ordinated 
in the cerebellum (which is known to receive audi- 

1 This seems little more than a had habit produced by two 
causes: (1) When they walk with each other their eyes are 
occupied in looking at each other"s fingers and faces, and cannot 
survey the ground which then is, as it were, explored by the 
feet: and (2) Their deafness makes them insensitive to the 
disagreeable noise that their feet make. 

2 Moos, quoted by McBride {Edinburgh Medical Journal 
February. 1882), says the staggering is cured in twenty-seven 
months after cereoro- spinal meningitis. I find it to have often 
lasted much longer. 

237 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1882 l 

tory nerve fibres) with the appropriate muscles, and 
the nervous machinery becomes structurally organ- 
ized in the first few years of life. If, then, this 
guiding sensation be suddenly abolished by disease, 
the machinery is thrown completely out of gear, 
and must form closer connections than before either 
with sight or touch. But the cerebellar tracts, be- 
ing already organized in another way, yield but 
slowly to the new co-ordinations now required, and 
for many years make the patient's gait uncertain, 
especially in the dark. Where the defect of the 
auditory nerve is congenital the cerebellar ma- 
chinery is organized from the very outset in co-ordi- 
nation with tactile sensations, and no difficulty oc- 
curs. To prove this hypothesis a minute medical 
examination of many typical cases will be required. 
If this prove confirmatory, it will then appear prob- 
able that many of the so-called paralyses after diph- 
theria, scarlet fever, etc., may be nothing but sudden 
ansesthesise of the semicircular canals." 

The minute medical examination I spoke of, I 
have been prevented by circumstances from making 
or getting made. What ought to be done would be 
to carefully test the staggering patients for such 
anresthesise of the body or limbs, losses of tendon 
reflex, and various locomotor symptoms of ataxia, 
as would show the presence of central nervous dis- 
order independent of the labyrinthine trouble, but 
joint results with it of the disease that left the 
subject deaf. If a certain residuum of patients 
were found without any signs of such nerve-central 

238 



[1882] T he SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

disorder, the hypothesis quoted would receive cor- 
roboration. I must confess, however, that the very 
large number of staggering and zigzagging deaf- 
mutes, who are free from any labyrinthine lesion 
(as evidenced by their being normal as respects 
dizziness), and whose cases have been made known 
to me since the preliminary report was written, 
make it seem plausible that the ataxic disorders 
usually flow directly from lesions of the locomotor 
centres, sequelae of the meningitis, scarlet fever, or 
whatever other disease the patient may have had. 
Whether they do so exclusively cannot now be de- 
cided. I know of no more interesting problem for 
a physician with good opportunities for observa- 
tion to solve, than that of the relation of the semi- 
circular canal sense to our ordinary locomotor in- 
nervation. And certainly fresh cases of deafness 
coupled with loss of sensibility to rotation seem the 
most favorable field of study. 

It has been suggested, I no longer know by whom, 
that the mysterious topographic instinct which 
some animals and certain classes of men possess, 
and which keeps them continuously informed of 
their "bearings," of which way they are heading, 
of the "lay of the land," etc., might be due to a kind 
of unconscious dead reckoning of the algebraic sum 
of all the angles through which they had twisted 
and turned in the course of their journey. If the 
semicircular canals are the organs of sensibility for 
angular rotation, the abolition of their function 
ought to injure the topographic faculty. I accord- 

239 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1882 J 

ingly asked in my circular the question: "Have 
you a good bump of locality?" A rather stupidly 
expressed phrase, but one which I supposed would 
be popularly intelligible. Forty-seven persons, not 
dizzy, or scarcely dizzy, answered this question dis- 
tinctly, forty with a "yes," and seven with a "no." 
So that in this (truly vague enough) matter, my in- 
quiries give no countenance to the suggestion al- 
luded to. 1 

"Dizziness" on high places was also made the sub- 
ject of one of my questions. This feeling, in those 
who experience it normally, is a compound of vari- 
ous muscular, cutaneous, and visceral sensations 
with vertigo ; and of course the answers of my corre- 
spondents, not being of an analytical sort, would be 
of very little value, even were they much more nu- 
merous than they are, They stand as follows : 

"Are you dizzy on high places?" 

Of those not or scarcely dizzy on whirling, sixteen 
say "yes," twenty-nine "no." 

Of those dizzy on whirling, twenty-nine say "yes," 
and fourteen "no." 

Taken in their crudity these answers suggest the 
bare possibility that anaesthesia of the semicircular 

1 In a long and interesting article in the Revue Philosophique 
for July, 1882 ("le Sens de l'Orientation et ses Organes"), 
M. C. Viguier maintains the view that the semicircular canals 
are organs in whose endolymph terrestrial magnetism deter- 
mines induced currents which vary with the position of the 
canals, and (apparently) enable the animal to recognize a lost 
direction as soon as he finds it again. Clever and learned as 
are M. Viguier's arguments, I confess they fail to awaken in me 
any conviction that their thesis is true. 

240 



[1882] THE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

canals may confer some little immunity from that 
particularly distressing form of imaginative weak- 
ness. The centres of imagination of falling may 
grow weak with the disuse of the sense for falling, 
and the various reflex results (feelings in the calves, 
hypogastrium, skin, respiratory apparatus, etc.), 
which help to constitute the massive feeling of 
dread, not following upon the sight of the abyss, as 
they normally should do, the subject may remain 
cool-headed, when in former times he would have 
been convulsed with emotion. 

One more point, of perhaps greater interest. The 
following letter from Dr. Beard of New York speaks 
for itself : 

New York, July 2, 1881. 

Dear Dr. James, — Acting upon your suggestion, I 
have succeeded in abolishing the sense of vertigo in my 
trance subjects. I have accomplished this in two 
ways. First, by means of the swing which you have 
used in your experiments. I find that persons when 
put into trance sleep and placed in a swing which is 
twisted up tightly, so that it untwists rapidly, and for 
a considerable time, feel no dizziness or nausea, but 
when brought out of the trance, at once walk away 
without the least difficulty. 

I find — as you did — that the great majority of indi- 
viduals cannot in the normal state do this; but are 
made very dizzy and sick, and sometimes even fall out 
of the swing. 

Secondly, by having the subject look at some limited 
space on the ceiling, holding his head up, and turning 
around rapidly four or five times. Scarcely any one 
can do this, in the normal condition, and walk off 

241 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1882 1 

straight. They will stagger, as though intoxicated or 
suffering from ataxia. These trance subjects, when put 
into that condition with their eyes open, can go through 
this test, and immediately walk off without any diffi- 
culty whatever. 

These experiments — I may say — have been witnessed 
by a large number of physicians in this city, and have 
been confirmed independently by some of them. There 
is no difficulty in confirming these experiments, when 
you have trained subjects to cooperate with you. 

I regard these experiments as of a demonstrative 
character; that is, as belonging to the class of experi- 
ments that prove the genuineness of the trance phenom- 
ena, since there are very few indeed who can simulate 
them. 

I have no doubt whatever that seasickness could be 
cured entirely by putting persons into trance. 

Yours, truly, 

George M. Beard. 

Finally (to wring the last drop from an inquiry 
which, however slender may be its basis of fact, will 
be accused by no one of not having had the maxi- 
mum possible number of theoretic conclusions ex- 
tracted from it!), I will subjoin the following ex- 
tract from one of my correspondents' letters as a 
crumb for vivisectional physiologists to whom the 
fact narrated may be unknown: 

"If a dog grows up and his tail is cut off suddenly, he 
staggers so badly he cannot cross a foot log." 1 

To all my correspondents I owe thanks for the 
facts imparted in this paper. Without the most 

1 Experiment made hy a preacher in East Tennessee, a friend 
of the writer. 

242 



[1882] T HE SENSE OF DIZZINESS 

painstaking co-operation of Prof. Samuel Porter, in 
particular, it could hardly have been written. To 
Principal Williams of the Hartford School, Miss 
Fuller of the Boston School, and Miss Eogers, of 
Northampton, my best thanks are also due. Dr. 
J. J. Putnam has assisted me with counsel and aid 
in the galvanic observations. Dr. Clarence J. Blake 
examined the condition of the ears of the Northamp- 
ton children, but not being able to deduce any con- 
clusions relevant to my own inquiry from his ob- 
servations, I leave them unrecorded here. 



243 



XV 

WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 1 

[1884] 

The physiologists who, during the past few years, 
have been so industriously exploring the functions 
of the brain, have limited their attempts at explana- 
tion to its cognitive and volitional performances. 
Dividing the brain into sensorial and motor centres, 
they have found their division to be exactly par- 
alleled by the analysis made by empirical psychol- 
ogy, of the perceptive and volitional parts of the 
mind into their simplest elements. But the wsthetic 
sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and 

[* Reprinted from Mind, 1884, 9, 188-205. This is James's 
original statement of the famous "James-Lange" theory of the 
emotions, made before James was acquainted with Lange's 
views. It is the article to which the author refers in the Princi- 
ples of Psychology (1890) as follows: "Now the general causes 
of the emotions are indubitably physiological. Prof. C. Lange of 
Copenhagen, in a pamphlet from which I have already quoted 
{ibid.), published in 1885 a physiological theory of their con- 
stitution and conditioning, which I had already broached the 
previous year in an article in Mind'" (Vol. II., p. 449). Most of 
the article is reprinted in the Principles (1890), Chap. XXV., 
but in scattered paragraphs. The treatment is there reorganized 
and greatly amplified, by the introduction, for example, of 
pathological material. Of the present article, the accounts of 
expressive reflexes (pp. 248-252) ; of the association of inherited 
emotional expressions with conventional stimuli (pp. 256-258) ; 
of the example from Brachet (p. 265) ; of the evidence from 
anaesthesia (p. 271) ; and of his correspondence with Struinpell 
(pp. 272-275) — appear not to have been reprinted. Ed.) 

244 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

pains, and its emotions, have been so ignored in all 
these researches that one is tempted to suppose 
that if either Dr. Ferrier or Dr. Munk were asked 
for a theory in brain-terms of the latter mental 
facts, they might both reply, either that they had 
as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or 
that they had found it so difficult to make distinct 
hypotheses, that the matter lay for them among the 
problems of the future, only to be taken up after 
the simpler ones of the present should have been 
definitively solved. 

And yet it is even now certain that of two things 
concerning the emotions, one must be true. Either 
separate and special centres, affected to them alone, 
are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to proc- 
esses occurring in the motor and sensory centres, 
already assigned, or in others like them, not yet 
mapped out. If the former be the case we must 
deny the current view, and hold the cortex to be 
something more than the surface of "projection" 
for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the 
body. If the latter be the case, we must ask whether 
the emotional "process" in the sensory or motor 
centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether 
it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of 
which those centres are already recognised to be 
the seat. The purpose of the following pages is to 
show that the last alternative comes nearest to the 
truth, and that the emotional brain-processes not 
only resemble the ordinary censorial brain-proc- 
esses, but in very truth are nothing but such 

245 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS ti884] 

processes variously combined. The main result of 
this will be to simplify our notions of the possible 
complications of brain-physiology, and to make us 
see that we have already a brain-scheme in our 
hands whose applications are much wider than its 
authors dreamed. But although this seems to be 
the chief result of the arguments I am to urge, I 
should say that they were not originally framed for 
the sake of any such result. They grew out of frag- 
mentary introspective observations, and it was only 
when these had already combined into a theory that 
the thought of the simplification the theory might 
bring to cerebral physiology occurred to me, and 
made it seem more important than before. 

I should say first of all that the only emotions 
I propose expressly to consider here are those that 
have a distinct bodily expression. That there are 
feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and 
excitement, bound up with mental operations, but 
having no obvious bodily expression for their conse- 
quence, would, I suppose, be held true by most read- 
ers. Certain arrangements of sounds, of lines, of 
colours, are agreeable, and others the reverse, with- 
out the degree of the feeling being sufficient to 
quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to 
movements of either the body or the face. Certain 
sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire 
us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a prob- 
lem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have 
to leave it unfinished. The first set of examples, the 
sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensa- 

246 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

tions, or the images of such. The second set seem to 
depend on processes in the ideational centres ex- 
clusively. Taken together, they appear to prove 
that there are pleasures and pains inherent in cer- 
tain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that 
action occur. The case of these feelings we will at 
present leave entirely aside, and confine our atten- 
tion to the more complicated cases in which a wave 
of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the 
perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the 
passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, 
curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the 
like, become then the names of the mental states 
with which the person is possessed. The bodily dis- 
turbances are said to be the "manifestation" of these 
several emotions, their "expression" or "natural 
language" ; and these emotions themselves, being so 
strongly characterized both from within and with- 
out, may be called the standard emotions. 

Our natural way of thinking about these standard 
emotions is that the mental perception of some fact 
excites the mental affection called the emotion, and 
that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily 
expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the 
bodily changes follow directly the perception of 
the exciting fact, and that oar feeling of the same 
changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense 
says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep ; we 
meet a bear, are frightened and run ; we are insulted 
by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis 
here to be defended says that this order of sequence 

247 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t ls ^ 

is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immedi- 
ately induced by the other, that the bodily mani- 
festations must first be interposed between, and that 
the more rational statement is that we feel sorry 
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid be- 
cause we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or 
tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as 
the case may be. Without the bodily states follow- 
ing on the perception, the latter would be purely 
cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emo- 
tional warmth. We might then see the bear, and 
judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it 
right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid 
or angry. 

Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty 
sure to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet 
neither many nor far-fetched considerations are re- 
quired to mitigate its paradoxical character, and 
possibly to produce conviction of its truth. 

To begin with, readers of this Journal do not 
need to be reminded that the nervous system of 
every living thing is but a bundle of predispositions 
to react in particular ways upon the contact of par- 
ticular features of the environment. As surely as 
the hermit-crab's abdomen presupposes the existence 
of empty whelk-shells somewhere to be found, so 
surely do the hound's olfactories imply the ex- 
istence, on the one hand, of deer's or foxes' feet, and 
on the other, the tendency to follow up their tracks. 
The neural machinery is but a hyphen between de- 
terminate arrangements of matter outside the body 

248 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

and determinate impulses to inhibition or discharge 
within its organs. When the hen sees a white oval 
object on the ground, she cannot leave it ; she must 
keep upon it and return to it, until at last its 
transformation into a little mass of moving chirping 
down elicits from her machinery an entirely new set 
of performances. The love of man for woman, or 
of the human mother for her babe, our wrath at 
snakes and our fear of precipices, may all be de- 
scribed similarly, as instances of the way in which 
peculiarly conformed pieces of the world's furni- 
ture will fatally call forth most particular mental 
and bodily reactions, in advance of, and often in 
direct opposition to, the verdict of our deliberate 
reason concerning them. The labours of Darwin 
and his successors are only just beginning to reveal 
the universal parasitism of each special creature 
upon other special things, and the way in which 
each creature brings the signature of its special 
relations stamped on its nervous system with it 
upon the scene. 

Every living creature is in fact a sort of lock, 
whose wards and springs presuppose special forms 
of key, — which keys however are not born attached 
to the locks, but are sure to be found in the world 
near by as life goes on. And the locks are indiffer- 
ent to any but their own keys. The egg fails to 
fascinate the hound, the bird does not fear the preci- 
pice, the snake waxes not wroth at his kind, the 
deer cares nothing for the woman or the human 
babe. Those who wish for a full development of 

249 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 18 ^ 

this point of view, should read Schneider's Der 
thierische Wille, — no other book shows how accu- 
rately anticipatory are the actions of animals, of the 
specific features of the environment in which they 
are to live. 

Now among these nervous anticipations are of 
course to be reckoned the emotions, so far as these 
may be called forth directly by the perception of 
certain facts. In advance of all experience of ele- 
phants no child can but be frightened if he sud- 
denly find one trumpeting and charging upon him. 
No woman can see a handsome little naked baby 
without delight, no man in the wilderness see a 
human form in the distance without excitement and 
curiosity. I said I should consider these emotions 
only so far as they have bodily movements of some 
sort for their accompaniments. But my first point 
is to show that their bodily accompaniments are 
much more far-reaching and complicated than we 
ordinarily suppose. 

In the earlier books on Expression, written 
mostly from the artistic point of view, the signs of 
emotion visible from without were the only ones 
taken account of. Sir Charles Bell's celebrated 
Anatomy of Expression noticed the respiratory 
changes; and Bain's and Darwin's treatises went 
more thoroughly still into the study of the visceral 
factors involved, — changes in the functioning of 
glands and muscles, and in that of the circulatory 
apparatus. But not even a Darwin has exhaus- 
tively enumerated all the bodily affections charac- 

250 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

teristic of any one of the standard emotions. More 
and more, as physiology advances, we begin to dis- 
cern how almost infinitely numerous and subtle 
they must be. The researches of Mosso with the 
plethysmograph have shown that not only the heart, 
but the entire circulatory system, forms a sort of 
sounding-board, which every change of our con- 
sciousness, however slight, may make reverberate. 
Hardly a sensation comes to us without sending 
waves of alternate constriction and dilatation 
down the arteries of our arms. The blood-vessels of 
the abdomen act reciprocally with those of the more 
outward parts. The bladder and bowels, the glands 
of the mouth, throat, and skin, and the liver, are 
known to be affected gravely in certain severe emo- 
tions, and are unquestionably affected transiently 
when the emotions are of a lighter sort. That the 
heart-beats and the rhythm of breathing play a lead- 
ing part in all emotions whatsoever, is a matter too 
notorious for proof. And what is really equally 
prominent, but less likely to be admitted until 
special attention is drawn to the fact, is the con- 
tinuous co-operation of the voluntary muscles in 
our emotional states. Even when no change of 
outward attitude is produced, their inward tension 
alters to suit each varying mood, and is felt as a dif- 
ference of tone or of strain. In depression the 
flexors tend to prevail ; in elation or belligerent ex- 
citement the extensors take the lead. And the vari- 
ous permutations and combinations of which these 
organic activities are susceptible, make it abstractly 

251 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1884 l 

possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, 
should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, 
when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood 
itself. 

The immense number of parts modified in each 
emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to repro- 
duce in cold blood the total and integral expression 
of any one of them. We may catch the trick with 
the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, 
glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an arti- 
ficially imitated sneeze lacks something of the 
reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the 
absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be 
rather "hollow." 

The next thing to be noticed is this, that every 
one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, 
acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the 
reader has never paid attention to this matter, he 
will be both interested and astonished to learn how 
many different local bodily feelings he can detect 
in himself as characteristic of his various emotional 
moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect 
him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion 
for the sake of any such curious analysis as this; 
but he can observe more tranquil states, and that 
may be assumed here to be true of the greater which 
is shown to be true of the less. Our whole cubic 
capacity is sensibly alive ; and each morsel of it con- 
tributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, 
pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of per- 
sonality that every one of us unfailingly carries 

252 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

with him. It is surprising what little items give 
accent to these complexes of sensibility. When 
worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the 
focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contrac- 
tion, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and 
brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is some- 
thing in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, 
a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough ; and so on 
for as many more instances as might be named. 
Our concern here being with the general view rather 
than with the details, I will not linger to discuss 
these but, assuming the point admitted that every 
change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on. 1 

I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole 
theory, which is this. If we fancy some strong emo- 
tion, and then try to abstract from our conscious- 
ness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily 
symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no 
"mind-stuff" out of which the emotion can be con- 
stituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intel- 

1 Of course the physiological question arises, hoiv are the 
changes felt? — after they are produced, by the sensory nerves 
of the organs bringing back to the brain a report of the modifi- 
cations that have occurred? or before they are produced, by our 
being conscious of the outgoing nerve-currents starting on their 
way downward towards the parts they are to excite? I believe 
all the evidence we have to be in favour of the former alter- 
native. The question is too minute for discussion here, but 
I have said something about it in a paper entitled "The Feeling 
of Effort," in the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Natural 
History Society, 1880 (translated in La_ Critique Philosophique 
for that year, and summarized in Mind XX. [1880], 582). [See 
above, p. 151. Ed.] See also G. E. Mliller's G-rundlegung der 
Psycliopliysik, § 110. 

253 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1884 1 

lectual perception is all that remains. It is true, 
that although most people, when asked, say that 
their introspection verifies this statement, some per- 
sist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot be made 
to understand the question. When you beg them to 
imagine away every feeling of laughter and of 
tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the 
ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you 
what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, 
whether it be anything more than the perception 
that the object belongs to the class "funny," they 
persist in replying that the thing proposed is a 
physical impossibility, and that they always must 
laugh, if they see a funny object. Of course the task 
proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludic- 
rous object and annihilating one's tendency to 
laugh. It is the purely speculative one of subtract- 
ing certain elements of feeling from an emotional 
state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying 
what the residual elements are. I cannot help 
thinking that all who rightly apprehend this prob- 
lem will agree with the proposition above laid 
down. What kind of an emotion of fear would be 
left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats 
nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips 
nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of 
visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impos- 
sible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and 
picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing 
of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clench- 
ing of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but 

254 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a 
placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly 
cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as 
the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the 
only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its 
place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judi- 
cial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual 
realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons 
merit chastisement for their sins. In like manner 
of grief : what would it be without its tears, its sobs, 
its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast- 
bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circum- 
stances are deplorable, and nothing more. Every 
passion in turn tells the same story. A purely dis- 
embodied human emotion is a nonentity. I do not 
say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things ; 
or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to 
cold intellectual lives ; but I say that for us, emotion 
dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. 
The more closely I scrutinise my states, the more 
persuaded I become, that whatever moods, affec- 
tions, and passions I have, are in very truth consti- 
tuted by, and made up of, those bodily changes we 
ordinarily call their expression or consequence ; and 
the more it seems to me that if I were to become 
corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from 
the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and 
drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intel- 
lectual form. Such an existence, although it seems 
to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apa- 
thetic to be keenly sought after by those born after 

255 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1884 l 

the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few gen- 
erations ago. 

But if the emotion is nothing but the feeling of 
the reflex bodily effects of what we call its "object," 
effects due to the connate adaptation of the nervous 
system to that object, we seem immediately faced by 
this objection : most of the objects of civilised men's 
emotions are things to which it would be preposter- 
ous to suppose their nervous systems connately 
adapted. Most occasions of shame and many insults 
are purely conventional, and vary with the social 
environment. The same is true of many matters of 
dread and of desire, and of many occasions of mel- 
ancholy and regret. In these cases, at least, it 
would seem that the ideas of shame, desire, regret, 
etc., must first have been attached by education and 
association to these conventional objects before the 
bodily changes could possibly be awakened. And 
if, in these cases the bodily changes follow the ideas, 
instead of giving rise to them, why not then in all 
cases? 

To discuss thoroughly this objection would carry 
us deep into the study of purely intellectual 
^Esthetics. A few words must here suffice. We will 
say nothing of the argument's failure to distinguish 
between the idea of an emotion and the emotion 
itself. We will only recall the well-known evolu- 
tionary principle that when a certain power has 
once been fixed in an animal by virtue of its utility 
in presence of certain features of the environment, 
it may turn out to be useful in presence of other 

256 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

features of the environment that had originally 
nothing to do with either producing or preserving 
it. A nervous tendency to discharge being once 
there, all sorts of unforeseen things may pull the 
trigger and let loose the effects. That among these 
things should be conventionalities of man's contriv- 
ing is a matter of no psychological consequence 
whatever. The most important part of my environ- 
ment is my fellow-man. The consciousness of his 
attitude towards me is the perception that normally 
unlocks most of my shames and indignations and 
fears. The extraordinary sensitiveness of this con- 
sciousness is shown by the bodily modifications 
wrought in us by the awareness that our fellow- 
man is noticing us at all. No one can walk across 
the platform at a public meeting with just the same 
muscular innervation he uses to walk across his 
room at home. No one can give a message to such a 
meeting without organic excitement. "Stage- 
fright" is only the extreme degree of that wholly 
irrational personal self-consciousness which every 
one gets in some measure, as soon as he feels the 
eyes of a number of strangers fixed upon him, even 
though he be inwardly convinced that their feeling 
towards him is of no practical account. 1 This 
being so, it is not surprising that the additional per- 

*Let it be noted in passing that this personal self -conscious- 
ness seems an altogether bodily affair, largely a consciousness 
of our attitude, and that, like other emotions, it reacts on its 
physical condition, and leads to modifications of the attitude, — 
to a certain rigidity in most men, but in children to a regular 
twisting and squirming fit, and in women to various grace- 
fully shy poses. 

257 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1884 ^ 

suasion that my fellow-man's attitude means either 
well or ill for me, should awaken stronger emotions 
still. In primitive societies "Well" may mean hand- 
ing me a piece of beef, and "111" may mean aiming a 
blow at my skull. In our "cultured age," "111" may 
mean cutting me in the street, and "Well," giving 
me an honorary degree. What the action itself may 
be is quite insignificant, so lon.g as I can perceive in 
it intent or animus. That is the emotion-arousing 
perception; and may give rise to as strong bodily 
convulsions in me, a civilised man experiencing the 
treatment of an artificial society, as in any savage 
prisoner of war, learning whether his captors are 
about to eat him or to make him a member of their 
tribe. 

But now, this objection disposed of, there arises a 
more general doubt. Is there any evidence, it may 
be asked, for the assumption that particular percep- 
tions do produce widespread bodily effects by a sort 
of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the 
arousal of an emotion or emotional idea? 

The only possible reply is, that there is most 
assuredly such evidence. In listening to poetry, 
drama, or heroic narrative, we are often surprised 
at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave 
flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the 
lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at 
intervals. In listening to music, the same is even 
more strikingly true. If we abruptly see a dark 
moving form in the woods, our heart stops beating, 
and we catch our breath instantly and before any 

258 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

articulate idea of danger can arise. If our friend 
goes near to the edge of a precipice, we get the well- 
known feeling of "all-overishness," and we shrink 
back, although we positively know him to be safe, 
and have no distinct imagination of his fall. The 
writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy 
of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse 
bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, 
and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it 
round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling 
save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world 
grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, 
and he knew no more. He had never heard of the 
sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and 
he had so little repugnance to it, and so little ap- 
prehension of any other sort of danger from it, that 
even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he 
could not help wondering how the mere physical 
presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occa- 
sion in him such formidable bodily effects. 

Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen 
edges crossing each other at right angles, and mov- 
ing to and fro. Our whole nervous organisation 
is "on edge" at the thought; and yet what emotion 
can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling 
itself, or the dread that more of it may come? The 
entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the 
senseless bodily effect the blades immediately arouse. 
This case is typical of a class : where an ideal emo- 
tion seems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is 
often nothing but a representation of the symptoms 

259 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1884 3 

themselves. One who has already fainted at the 
sight of blood may witness the preparations for a 
surgical operation with uncontrollable heart-sinking 
and anxiety. He anticipates certain feelings, and 
the anticipation precipitates their arrival. I am 
told of a case of morbid terror, of which the subject 
confessed that what possessed her seemed, more than 
anything, to be the fear of fear itself. In the 
various forms of what Professor Bain calls "tender 
emotion," although the appropriate object must 
usually be directly contemplated before the emotion 
can be aroused, yet sometimes thinking of the symp- 
toms of the emotion itself may have the same effect. 
In sentimental natures, the thought of "yearning" 
will produce real "yearning." And, not to speak 
of coarser examples, a mother's imagination of the 
caresses she bestows on her child may arouse a 
spasm of parental longing. 

In such cases as these, we see plainly how the 
emotion both begins and ends with what we call its 
effects or manifestations. It has no mental status 
except as either the presented feeling, or the idea, 
of the manifestations ; which latter thus constitute 
its entire material, its sum and substance, and its 
stock-in-trade. And these cases ought to make us 
see how in all cases the feeling of the manifestations 
may play a much deeper part in the constitution of 
the emotion than we are wont to suppose. 

If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it 
ought to be that any voluntary arousal of the so- 
called manifestations of a special emotion ought to 

260 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

give us the emotion itself. Of course in the major- 
ity of emotions, this test is inapplicable; for many 
of the manifestations are in organs over which we 
have no volitional control. Still, within the limits 
in which it can be verified, experience fully corrobo- 
rates this test. Every one knows how panic is in- 
creased by flight, and how the giving way to the 
symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions 
themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow 
more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, 
until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and 
with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In 
rage, it is notorious how we "work ourselves up" to 
a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression. Re- 
fuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten 
before venting your anger, and its occasion seems 
ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere 
figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a 
moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with 
a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There 
is no more valuable precept in moral education than 
this, as all who have experience know : if we wish to 
conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in our- 
selves, we must assiduously, and in the first in- 
stance coldbloodedly, go through the outward mo- 
tions of those contrary dispositions we prefer to 
cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly 
come, in the fading out of the sullenness or depres- 
sion, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindli- 
ness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the 
eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral 

261 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1884 ^ 

aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass 
the genial compliment, and your heart must be 
frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw ! 

The only exceptions to this are apparent, not 
real. The great emotional expressiveness and mo- 
bility of certain persons often lead us to say "They 
would feel more if they talked less." And in an- 
other class of persons, the explosive energy with 
which passion manifests itself on critical occasions, 
seems correlated with the way in which they bottle 
it up during the intervals. But these are only eccen- 
tric types of character, and within each type the law 
of the last paragraph prevails. The sentimentalist 
is so constructed that "gushing" is his or her normal 
mode of expression. Putting a stopper on the 
"gush" will only to a limited extent cause more 
"real" activities to take its place; in the main it 
will simply produce listlessness. On the other hand 
the ponderous and bilious "slumbering volcano," let 
him repress the expression of his passions as he will, 
will find them expire if they get no vent at all; 
whilst if the rare occasions multiply which he deems 
worthy of their outbreak, he will find them grow in 
intensity as life proceeds. 

I feel persuaded there is no real exception to the 
law. The formidable effects of suppressed tears 
might be mentioned, and the calming results of 
speaking out your mind when angry and having 
done with it. But these are also but specious 
wanderings from the rule. Every perception must 
lead to some nervous result. If this be the normal 

262 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

emotional expression, it soon expends itself, and in 
the natural course of things a calm succeeds. But 
if the normal issue be blocked from any cause, the 
currents may under certain circumstances invade 
other tracts, and there work different and worse 
effects. Thus vengeful brooding may replace a 
burst of indignation; a dry heat may consume the 
frame of one who fain would weep, or he may, as 
Dante says, turn to stone within ; and then tears or 
a storming-fit may bring a grateful relief. When 
we teach children to repress their emotions, it is not 
that they may feel more, quite the reverse. It is 
that they may think more! for to a certain extent 
whatever nerve-currents are diverted from the 
regions below, must swell the activity of the thought- 
tracts of the brain. 1 

The last great argument in favour of the priority 
of the bodily symptoms to the felt emotion is the 
ease with which we formulate by its means patho- 
logical cases and normal cases under a common 
scheme. In every asylum we find examples of ab- 
solutely unmotived fear, anger, melancholy, or con- 
ceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy 

1 This is the opposite of what happens in injuries to the 
brain, whether from outward violence, inward rupture or tumor, 
or mere starvation from disease. The cortical permeability- 
seems reduced, so that excitement, instead of propagating itself 
laterally through the ideational channels as before, tends to 
take the downward track into the organs of the body. The 
consequence is that we have tears, laughter, and temper-fits, 
on the most insignificant provocation, accompanying a propor- 
tional feebleness in logical thought and the power of volitional 
attention and decision. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS ti884] 

which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons 
why it should give way. In the former cases we 
must suppose the nervous machinery to be so 
"labile" in some one emotional direction, that almost 
every stimulus, however inappropriate, will cause it 
to upset in that way, and as a consequence to en- 
gender the particular complex of feelings of which 
the psychic body of the emotion consists. Thus, to 
take one special instance, if inability to draw deep 
breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar 
epigastric change felt as "precordial anxiety," with 
an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouch- 
ing attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other 
visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously 
occur together in a certain person; his feeling of 
their combination is the emotion of dread, and he is 
the victim of what is known as morbid fear. A 
friend who has had occasional attacks of this most 
distressing of all maladies, tells me that in his case 
the whole drama seems to centre about the region 
of the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his 
main effort during the attacks is to get control of his 
inspirations and to slow his heart, and that the mo- 
ment he attains to breathing deeply and to holding 
himself erect, the dread, ipso facto, seems to depart. 1 

1 It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in 
which objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These how- 
ever fail to prove anything against our theory, for it is of 
course possible that the cortical centres normally percipient of 
dread as a complex of cardiac and other organic sensations due 
to real bodily change, should become primarily excited in brain- 
disease, and give rise to an hallucination of the changes being 
there, — an hallucination of dread, consequently, coexistent with 

264 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

The account given to Brachet by one of his own 
patients of her opposite condition, that of emotional 
insensibility, has been often quoted, and deserves 
to be quoted again : 

"I still continue (she says) to suffer constantly; I 
have not a moment of comfort, and no human sensa- 
tions. Surrounded by all that can render life happy and 
agreeable, still to me the faculty of enjoyment and of 
feeling is wanting — both have become physical impos- 
sibilities. In everything, even in the most tender 
caresses of my children, I find only bitterness. I cover 
them with kisses, but there is something between their 
lips and mine; and this horrid something is between 
me and all the enjoyments of life. My existence is in- 
complete. The functions and acts of ordinary life, 
it is true, still remain to me; but in every one of them 
there is something wanting — to wit, the feeling which 
is proper to them, and the pleasure which follows them. 
. . . Each of my senses, each part of my proper self, 
is as it were separated from me and can no longer af- 
ford me any feeling; this impossibility seems to depend 
upon a void which I feel in the front of my head, and 
to be due to the diminution of the sensibility over the 
whole surface of my body, for it seems to me that I 
never actually reach the objects which I touch. ... 7 

a comparatively calm pulse, etc. I say it is possible, for I am 
ignorant of observations which might test the fact. Trance, 
ecstasy, etc., offer analogous examples, — not to speak of ordinary 
dreaming. Under all these conditions one may have the liveli- 
est subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the more 
visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central 
activity, with complete peripheral repose. Whether the sub- 
jective strength of the feeling be due in these cases to the actual 
energy of the central disturbance, or merely to the narrowing 
of the field of consciousness, need not concern us. In the 
asylum cases of melancholy, there is usually a narrowing of 
the field. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1884 3 

feel well enough the changes of temperature on my 
skin, but I no longer experience the internal feeling 
of the air when I breathe. . . . All this would be a 
small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which 
is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling 
and of any sort of enjoyment, although I experience 
a need and desire of them that render my life an in- 
comprehensible torture. Every function, every action 
of my life remains, but deprived of the feeling that 
belongs to it, of the enjoyment that should follow it. 
My feet are cold, I warm them, but gain no pleasure 
from the warmth. I recognize the taste of all I eat, 
without getting any pleasure from it. . . . My chil- 
dren are growing handsome and healthy, everyone tells 
me so, I see it myself, but the delight, the inward 
comfort I ought to feel, I fail to get. Music has lost 
all charm for me, I used to love it dearly. My daughter 
plays very well, but for me it is mere noise. That 
lively interest which a year ago made me hear a de- 
licious concert in the smallest air their fingers played, 
— that thrill, that general vibration which made me 
shed such tender tears, — all that exists no more." 1 

Other victims describe themselves as closed in 
walls of ice or covered with an india-rubber integu- 
ment, through which no impression penetrates to 
the sealed-np sensibility. 

If our hypothesis be true, it makes us realise more 
deeply than ever how much our mental life is knit 
up with our corporeal frame, in the strictest sense 
of the term. Rapture, love, ambition, indignation, 
and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the 

1 Quoted by Semal : Be la Sensibility ge'ne'rale dans les Affec- 
tions m&lancoliques, Paris, 1876, pp. 130-135. 

266 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

same soil with the grossest bodily sensations of 
pleasure and of pain. But it was said at the outset 
that this would be affirmed only of what we then 
agreed to call the "standard" emotions ; and that 
those inward sensibilities that appeared devoid at 
first sight of bodily results should be left out of our 
account. We had better, before closing, say a word 
or two about these latter feelings. 

They are, the reader will remember, the moral, 
intellectual, and aesthetic feelings. Concords of 
sounds, of colours, of lines, logical consistencies, 
teleological fitness, affect us with a pleasure that 
seems ingrained in the very form of the representa- 
tion itself, and to borrow nothing from any rever- 
beration surging up from the parts below the brain. 
The Herbartian psychologists have tried to distin- 
guish feelings due to the form in which ideas may be 
arranged. A geometrical demonstration may be as 
"pretty" and an act of justice as "neat" as a draw- 
ing or a tune, although the prettiness and neatness 
seem here to be a pure matter of sensation, and 
there to have nothing to do with sensation. We 
have then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely 
cerebral forms of pleasure and displeasure, appar- 
ently not agreeing in their mode of production with 
the so-called "standard" emotions we have been 
analysing. And it is certain that readers whom 
our reasons have hitherto failed to convince, will 
now start up at this admission, and consider that by 
it we give up our whole case. Since musical percep- 
tions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse a 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1884 J 

form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not 
more natural to suppose that in the case of the so- 
called "standard" emotions, prompted by the pres- 
ence of objects or the experience of events, the emo- 
tional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily 
expression something that comes later and is added 
on? 

But a sober scrutiny of the cases of pure cerebral 
emotion gives little force to this assimilation. Un- 
less in them there actually be coupled with the in- 
tellectual feeling a bodily reverberation of some 
kind, unless we actually laugh at the neatness of 
the mechanical device, thrill at the justice of the 
act, or tingle at the perfection of the musical form, 
our mental condition is more allied to a judgment 
of right than to anything else. And such a judg- 
ment is rather to be classed among awarenesses of 
truth : it is a cognitive act. But as a matter of fact 
the intellectual feeling hardly ever does exist thus 
unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at 
work, as careful introspection will show, far more 
than we usually suppose. Still, where long famili- 
arity with a certain class of effects has blunted emo- 
tional sensibility thereto as much as it has sharp- 
ened the taste and judgment, we do get the intellect- 
ual emotion, if such it can be called, pure and 
undefiled. And the dryness of it, the paleness, the 
absence of all glow, as it may exist in a thoroughly 
expert critic's mind, not only shows us what an alto- 
gether different thing it is from the "standard" emo- 
tions we considered first, but makes us suspect that 

268 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

almost the entire difference lies in the fact that the 
bodily sounding-board, vibrating in the one case, is 
in the other mute. "Not so very bad" is, in a person 
of consummate taste, apt to be the highest limit of 
approving expression. "Rien ne me choque" is said 
to have been Chopin's superlative of praise of new 
music. A sentimental layman would feel, and ought 
to feel, horrified, on being admitted into such a 
critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of 
human significance, are the motives for favour or 
disfavour that there prevail. The capacity to make 
a nice spot on the wall will outweigh a picture's 
whole content; a foolish trick of words will pre- 
serve a poem; an utterly meaningless fitness of se- 
quence in one musical composition set at naught 
any amount of "expressiveness" in another. 

I remember seeing an English couple sit for more 
than an hour on a piercing February day in the 
Academy at Venice before the celebrated "Assump- 
tion" by Titian ; and when I, after being chased from 
room to room by the cold, concluded to get into the 
sunshine as fast as possible and let the pictures go, 
but before leaving drew reverently near to them to 
learn with what superior forms of susceptibility 
they might be endowed, all I overheard was the 
woman's voice murmuring: "What a deprecatory 
expression her face wears! What self-abnegation! 
How unworthy she feels of the honour she is receiv- 
ing!" Their honest hearts had been kept warm 
all the time by a glow of spurious sentiment that 
would have fairly made old Titian sick. Mr. Kuskin 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1884 1 

somewhere makes the (for him) terrible admission 
that religious people as a rule care little for pic- 
tures, and that when they do care for them they 
generally prefer the worst ones to the best. Yes! 
in every art, in every science, there is the keen 
perception of certain relations being right or not, 
and there is the emotional flush and thrill conse- 
quent thereupon. And these are two things, not 
one. In the former of them it is that experts and 
masters are at home. The latter accompaniments 
are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, 
but that may be experienced in their fulness by 
Cretins and Philistines in whom the critical judg- 
ment is at its lowest ebb. The "marvels" of Science, 
about which so much edifying popular literature is 
written, are apt to be "caviare" to the men in the 
laboratories. Cognition and emotion are parted 
even in this last retreat, — who shall say that their 
antagonism may not just be one phase of the world- 
old struggle known as that between the spirit and 
the flesh? — a struggle in which it seems pretty cer- 
tain that neither party will definitively drive the 
other off the field. 

To return now to our starting-point, the physi- 
ology of the brain. If we suppose its cortex to con- 
tain centres for the perception of changes in each 
special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, in 
each muscle, each joint, and each vise us, and to 
contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a 
scheme perfectly capable of representing the proc- 
ess of the emotions. An object falls on a sense-organ 

270 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

and is apperceived by the appropriate cortical 
centre ; or else the latter, excited in some other way, 
gives rise to an idea of the same object. Quick as 
a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their 
pre-ordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, 
skin and viscus ; and these alterations, apperceived 
like the original object, in as many specific portions 
of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and 
transform it from an object-simplv-apprehended into 
an object-emotionally-felt. No new principles have 
to be invoked, nothing is postulated beyond the 
ordinary reflex circuit, and the topical centres ad- 
mitted in one shape or another by all to exist. 

It must be confessed that a crucial test of the 
truth of the hypothesis is quite as hard to obtain 
as its decisive refutation. A case of complete in- 
ternal and external corporeal anaesthesia, without 
motor alteration or alteration of intelligence except 
emotional apathy, would afford, if not a crucial test, 
at least a strong presumption, in favour of the truth 
of the view we have set forth ; whilst the persistence 
of strong emotional feeling in such a case would 
completely overthrow our case. Hysterical anaes- 
thesias seem never to be complete enough to cover 
the ground. Complete anaesthesias from organic 
disease, on the other hand, are excessively rare. In 
the famous case of Eemigius Leims, no mention is 
made by the reporters of his emotional condition, 
a circumstance which by itself affords no presump- 
tion that it was normal, since as a rule nothing ever 
is noticed without a pre-existing question in the 

271 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1884 1 

mind. Dr. Georg Winter has recently described a 
case somewhat similar, 1 and in reply to a question, 
kindly writes to me as follows : "The case has been 
for a year and a half entirely removed from my ob- 
servation. But so far as I am able to state, the man 
was characterised by a certain mental inertia and 
indolence. He was tranquil, and had on the whole 
the temperament of a phlegmatic. He was not irri- 
table, not quarrelsome, went quietly about his farm- 
work, and left the care of his business and house- 
keeping to other people. In short, he gave one the 
impression of a placid countryman, who has no in- 
terests beyond his work." Dr. Winter adds that 
in studying the case he paid no particular atten- 
tion to the man's psychic condition, as this seemed 
"nebensachlich" to his main purpose. I should add 
that the form of my question to Dr. Winter could 
give him no clue as to the kind of answer I expected. 
Of course, this case proves nothing, but it is to be 
hoped that asylum-physicians and nervous special- 
ists may begin methodically to study the relation 
between anaesthesia and emotional apathy. If the 
hypothesis here suggested is ever to be definitively 
confirmed or disproved it seems as if it must be by 
them, for they alone have the data in their hands. 

P.S. — By an unpardonable forgetfulness at the time 
of despatching my MS. to the Editor, I ignored the 
existence of the extraordinary case of total anaesthesia 
published by Professor Strumpell in Ziemssen's 

1 "Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anaesthesie," Inaugural-Disserta- 
tion. Heidelberg, Winter, 1882. 

272 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

Deutsches Archiv fiir Idinische Medicin xxii., 321, 
of which I had nevertheless read reports at the time of 
its publication. [Gf. first report of the case in Mind, 
X., 263, translated from P finger's Archiv. Ed.] I 
believe that it constitutes the only remaining case of 
the sort in medical literature, so that with it our survey 
is complete. On referring to the original, which is 
important in many connexions, I found that the patient, 
a shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely anaes- 
thetic, inside and out, with the exception of one eye 
and one ear, had shown shame on the occasion of soil- 
ing his bed, and grief, when a formerly favourite dish 
was set before him, at the thought that he could no 
longer taste its flavour. As Dr. Striimpell seemed 
however to have paid no special attention to his psychic 
states, so far as these are matter for our theory, I 
wrote to him in a few words what the essence of the 
theory was, and asked him to say whether he felt sure 
the grief and shame mentioned were real feelings in 
the boy's mind, or only the reflex manifestations pro- 
voked by certain perceptions, manifestations that an 
outside observer might note, but to which the boy him- 
self might be insensible. 

Dr. Striimpell has sent me a very obliging reply, 
of which I translate the most important passage. 

"I must indeed confess that I naturally failed to 
institute with my Anwsthetiker observations as special 
as the sense of your theory would require. Neverthe- 
less I think I can decidedly make the statement, that 
he was by no means completely lacking in emotional 
affections. In addition to the feelings of grief and 
shame mentioned in my paper, I recall distinctly that 
he showed e.g., anger, and frequently quarrelled with 
the hospital attendants. He also manifested fear lest ' 
I should punish him. In short, I do not think that 
my case speaks exactly in favour of your theory. On 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1884 3 

the other hand, I will not affirm that it positively 
refutes your theory. For my case was certainly one 
of a very centrally conditioned anaesthesia (perception- 
anaesthesia, like that of hysterics) and therefore the 
conduction of outward impressions may in him have 
been undisturbed." 

I confess that I do not see the relevancy of the last 
consideration, and this makes me suspect that my 
own letter was too briefly or obscurely expressed to put 
my correspondent fully in possession of my own thought. 
For his reply still makes no explicit reference to any- 
thing but the outward manifestations of emotion in 
the boy. Is it not at least conceivable that, just as a 
stranger, brought into the boy's presence for the first 
time, and seeing him eat and drink and satisfy other 
natural necessities, would suppose him to have the feel- 
ings of hunger, thirst, etc., until informed by the boy 
himself that he did all these things with no feeling 
at all but that of sight and sound — is it not, I say, at 
least possible, that Dr. Strumpell, addressing no direct 
introspective questions to his patient, and the patient 
not being of a class from which one could expect volun- 
tary revelations of that sort, should have similarly 
omitted to discriminate between a feeling and its habit- 
ual motor accompaniment, and erroneously taken the 
latter as proof that the former was there ? Such a mis- 
take is of course possible, and I must therefore repeat 
Dr. StrumpelPs own words, that his case does not yet 
refute my theory. Should a similar case recur, it 
ought to be interrogated as to the inward emotional 
state that co-existed with the outward expressions of 
shame, anger, etc. And if it then turned out that the 
patient recognized explicitly the same mood of feeling 
known under those names in his former normal state, 
my theory would of course fall. It is, however, to me 
incredible that the patient should have an identical 

274 



[1884] WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

feeling, for the dropping out of the organic sounding- 
board would necessarily diminish its volume in some 
way. The teacher of Dr. Striimpell's patient found a 
mental deficiency in him during his anaesthesia, that 
may possibly have been due to the consequences result- 
ing to his general intellectual vivacity from the sub- 
traction of so important a mass of feelings, even though 
they were not the whole of his emotional life. Who- 
ever wishes to extract from the next case of total anaes- 
thesia the maximum of knowledge about the emotions, 
will have to interrogate the patient with some such 
notion as that of my article in his mind. We can define 
the pure psychic emotions far better by starting from 
such an hypothesis and modifying it in the way of 
restriction and subtraction, than by having no definite 
hypothesis at all. Thus will the publication of my 
article have been justified, even though the theory it 
advocates, rigorously taken, be erroneous. The best 
thing I can say for it is, that in writing it, I have almost 
persuaded myself it may be true. 



275 



XVI 

THE KELIGIOUS ASPECT OF 
PHILOSOPHY 1 

[1885] 

It is certain that we live in a philosophic age. 
Mrs. Partington's mop, as she plied it against the 
Atlantic Ocean, was a potent engine compared with 
the command to "halt" with which Positivism tried, 
and tries, to bring the heaving tides of man's in- 
quisitiveness to rest. The worst of it is that we 
are getting deeper and deeper in. Every new book 
thickens the fray, and is one more thing with which 
to settle accounts ; and any bit of scientific research 
becomes an angle and place of vantage from which 
arguments are brought to bear. When a branch of 
human activity is fermenting like this, it happens 
that individual sharers in the movement profit by 
the common level being raised, and do easily what, 
perhaps, in an isolated way they never could have 

[* Review of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, by Josiah 
Royce, Boston, 1885. Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly, 1885, 
55, 840-843. Interesting for the light which it throws on James's 
relations with idealism. In this review he states that he finds 
idealism to afford the most promising solution of the problem 
of thought's reference to reality. James acknowledged his obli- 
gations to Royce in a note appended to "The Function of 
Cognition" (1885), but he afterwards rejected the idealistic 
solution. Cf. Meaning of Truth (1909), p. 22, note. Ed.] 

276 



[1885] RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 

done at all. We doubt if, at the dawn of our pres- 
ent philosophic movement, say in Sir William Ham- 
ilton's time, a writer with Dr. Boyce's ideas could 
possibly have expressed them in so easy and unen- 
cumbered and effectual form. A familiar catch- 
word replaces a tedious setting forth; a reference 
to a popular writer serves instead of the heavy con- 
struction of an imaginary opponent ; and above all, 
important objections are not likely to be overlooked 
or forgot. 

But although the age is philosophical, it is not so 
after the fashion of Hegel's age in Germany, or 
Cousin's age in France. We have no Emperor of 
Philosophy in any country to-day, but a headless 
host of princes, with their alliances and feuds. 
This seems at first anarchic, and is apt to give com- 
fort to the scoffers at metaphysical inquiry, and to 
all who believe that only the study of "facts" can 
lead to definitive results. The addition to the com- 
batants of Dr. Royce, with his book, can only in- 
crease this first impression of confusion; for, like 
Descartes and Fichte and many another hero of 
belief, he begins by laying about him ruthlessly, and 
establishing a philosophic desert of doubt on which 
his own impregnable structure is to be reared. And 
yet a closer survey shows that to a great extent all 
these quarrels and recriminations of the modern 
thinkers are over matters of detail, and that, 
although they obey no common leader, they for the 
most part obey a common drift, — the drift, namely, 
towards a phenomenalistic or idealistic creed. To 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS P«5J 

this conclusion Dr. Royce also sweeps, with a mo- 
mentum that carries him beyond Ferrier and Mill 
and Bain, beyond Hodgson, Renouvier, and Bowne, 
beyond the disciples of Schopenhauer and the dis- 
ciples of Fichte and Hegel, wherever found, and 
beyond a number of contemporary German idealists 
whose names need not be cited here. Such think- 
ers all agree that there can be no other kind of 
Reality than reality-for-thought. They differ only 
in the arguments they use to prove this thesis, and 
in deciding whose thought and what kind of 
thought that thought which is the reality of reali- 
ties may be. 

Dr. Royce's new and original proof of Idealism is, 
so far as we know, the most positive and radical 
proof yet proposed. It is short and simple, when 
once seen, and yet so subtle that it is no wonder it 
was never seen before. These short and simple 
suggestions that philosophers make from time to 
time — Locke's question about essence, for example, 
Berkeley's about matter, Hume's about cause, and 
Kant's about necessary judgments, — have an intol- 
erable way with them of sticking, in spite of all one 
can do. To scholastic minds, who have made their 
bed, and wish for nothing further than to snore 
dogmatically and comfortably on, these questions 
must seem like very vermin, not to be conquered by 
any logical insect powder or philosophic comb. 

The particular gadfly which Dr. Royce adds to the 
list is this : "How can a thought refer to, intend, or 
signify any particular reality outside of itself?" 

278 



[1885] EELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 

Suppose the reality there, and the thought there; 
suppose the thought to resemble just that reality, 
and nought besides in the world: still, asks our 
author, what is meant by saying that the thought 
stands for or represents that reality, or indeed any 
reality at all? Why isn't it just like the case of two 
eggs, or two toothaches, which may, it is true, re- 
semble and duplicate each other exactly, but which 
are not held to mean or intend each other the least 
in the world? If the eggs and the toothaches are, 
each one of them, a separate substantive fact, shut 
up in its own skin and knowing nothing of the 
world outside, why are not one's thought, for ex- 
ample, of the Moon and the real Moon in exactly 
the same predicament? The Moon in our thought 
is our thought's Moon. Whatever we may think of 
her is true of her, for she is but the creature of 
our thinking. If we say "her hidden hemisphere 
is inhabited," it is inhabited, for us; and otherwise 
than for us that moon, the moon in our mind, has 
no existence. A critic cannot prove us wrong by 
bringing in a "real" moon with an uninhabited back 
hemisphere; he cannot, by comparing that moon 
with ours and showing the want of resemblance, 
make our moon "false." To do that, he would first 
have to establish that the thought in our mind 
was a thought of just that external moon, and 
intended to be true of it. But neither he nor we 
could establish that: it would be worse than a 
gratuitous, it would be a senseless, proposition. 
Our Moon has nothing to do with the real moon; 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1885 ^ 

she is a totally additional fact, pursuing her sub- 
jective destiny all alone, and only accidentally per- 
ceived by an outside critic to agree or disagree with 
another moon, which he knows and chooses to call 
real, but which is really out of all relation to the 
one in our mind's eye. At most, the critic might 
say he was reminded or not reminded of that other 
moon by our Moon; but he could not say that ours 
gave either a true or a false account of the other, 
simply because ours never pretended to give any 
account, or to refer to the other moon, at all. Nor 
can we ourselves make it refer to that other moon, 
by "proposing" or "supposing" that it does so refer ;. 
all we can propose or suppose is some altogether 
new moon in our own mind, and refer the old 
one there to that one. Over all such moons we 
have complete control, but over nothing else under 
heaven. At least, thinks Dr. Eoyce, such ought to 
be our inference, if the notion of common sense be 
true, that our thought and the reality are two 
wholly disconnected things. 

The more one thinks, the more one feels that 
there is a real puzzle here. Turn and twist as we 
will, we are caught in a tight trap. Although we 
cannot help believing that our thoughts do mean 
realities and are true or false of them, we cannot 
for the life of us ascertain how they can mean them. 
If thought be one thing and reality another, by what 
pincers, from out of all the realities, does the 
thought pick out the special one it intends to know? 
And if the thought knows the reality falsely, the 

280 



[1885] RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 

difficulty of answering the question becomes indeed 
extreme. 

Our author calls the question insoluble on these 
terms ; and we are inclined to think him right, and 
to suspect that his idealistic escape from the 
quandary may be the best one for us all to take. 
We supposed, just now, a critic comparing the real 
moon and our mental moon. Let him now help us 
forward. We saw that even he could not make it 
out that our mental moon should refer to just that 
individual real moon, and to nothing else. We 
could not make it out either, and certainly the real 
moon itself could not make it out. We saw, how- 
ever, that we could make anything in our own mind 
refer to anything else there, — provided, of course, 
the two things were objects of a single act of 
thought; and the reason why our moon could not 
refer to the real moon was that the two moons were 
not facts in a common mind. But now imagine 
our "critic," instead of being the mere dissevered 
third thing he was, to be a common mind. Imag- 
ine his thought of our thought to be our thought, 
and his thought of the real moon to be the real 
moon. Both it and we have now become consub- 
stantial ; we are reduced to a common denominator. 
Both of us are members of the one total Thought, 
and any relation which that Thought draws between 
its members is as real as the members themselves. 
If that Thought intend one of its members to "rep- 
resent" the other, and represent it either falsely or 
truly, "'tis but thinking, and it is done." There is 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1885 1 

no other way in which one thing can "represent" 
another ; and no possibility of either truth or false- 
hood unless the function of representation be genu- 
inely there. An "Over- Soul/' of whose enveloping 
thought our thought and the things we think of are 
alike fractions, — such is the only hypothesis that 
can form a basis for the reality of truth and of error 
in the world. 

The reality of truth and error are, then, Dr. 
Royce's novel reason for believing that all that is 
has the foundations of its being laid in an infinite 
all-inclusive Mind. Upon the highest heights of 
dogmatism and in the deepest depths of skepticism, 
alike the argument blooms, saying, "Whatever 
things be false, and whatever things be true, one 
thing stands forever true, and that is that the En- 
veloping Mind must be there to make them either 
false or true." 

To the lay-reader, this absolute Idealism doubt- 
less seems insubstantial and unreal enough. But 
it is astonishing to learn how many paths lead 
up to it. Dr. Royce's path is only one. The others 
are of various kinds and degrees, and may be found 
in all sorts of books, few of them together. But 
taken altogether, they end by making about as for- 
midable a convergence of testimony as the history 
of opinion affords. The persons most pleased by Dr. 
Royce's book will no doubt be the Hegelians here 
and in Great Britain ; for it seems to us that he has 
reached a religious result hardly distinguishable 
from their own, by a method entirely free from that 

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[1885] RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY 

identification of contradictories which is the great 
stumbling-block in the Hegelian system of thought. 
The result is that all truth is known to one Thought, 
that is infinite, in which the world lives and moves 
and has its being, which abides and waxes not old, 
and in which there is neither variableness nor 
shadow of turning. The ordinary objection to a 
pantheistic monism like this is the ethical one, that 
it makes all that happens a portion of the eternal 
reason, and so must nourish a fatalistic mood, and 
a willingness to accept and consecrate whatever is, 
no matter what its moral quality may be. Dr. 
Royce is not as disdainful of this difficulty as the 
Hegelians are. We are not sure he has got over 
it, but he has bravely and beautifully attacked it; 
and his section on the problem of evil, in his last 
chapter, is as original and fresh a treatment of the 
subject as we know. 

Unfortunately, we have no space to do more than 
recommend it to the reader's attention. And now 
that we find ourselves at the end of our tether, we 
wonder whether a notice entirely made up of quo- 
tations would not have been a better thing than this 
attempt of ours to set forth the most fundamental, 
it is true, but still the driest, portion of the book. 
Never was a philosophic work less dry; never one 
more suggestive of springtime, or, as we may say, 
more redolent of the smell of the earth. Never was 
a gentler, easier irony shown in discussion; and 
never did a more subtle analytic movement keep 
constantly at such close quarters with the cubical 

283 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS *1885] 

and concrete facts of human life as shown in indi- 
viduals. In the entire ethical portion of the work 
its author shows himself to be a first-rate moralist, 
in the old-fashioned sense of the word, as one who 
knows delightfully how to describe the lights and 
shadows of special moral types and tendencies. In 
his discussions of the ethics of "sympathy" and of 
the ethics of "progress" are passages which are mas- 
terpieces in this line. And here again, from the 
very depths of the desert of skepticism, the flower of 
moral faith is found to bloom. Everything in Dr. 
Eoyce is radical. There is nothing to remind one 
of that dreary fighting of each step of a slow retreat 
to which the theistic philosophers of the ordinary 
common-sense school have accustomed us. For this 
reason the work must carry a true sursum corda 
into the minds of those who feel in their bones that 
man's religious interests must be able to swallow 
and digest and grow fat upon all the facts and 
theories of modern science, but who yet have not the 
capacity to see with their own eyes how it may be 
done. There is plenty of leveling in Dr. Royce's 
book, but it all ends by being a leveling-up. The 
Thought of which our thought is part is lord of all, 
and, to use the author's own phrase, he does not see 
why we should clip our own wings to keep ourselves 
from flying out of our own coop over our own fence 
into our own garden. California may feel proud 
that a son of hers should at a stroke have scored 
so many points in a game not yet exceedingly fa- 
miliar on the Pacific slope. 

284 



XVII 

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST 
LIMBS * 

[1887] 

Many persons with lost limbs still seem to feel 
them in their old place. This illusion is so well 
known, and the material for study is so abundant, 
that it seems strange that no more systematic effort 
to investigate the phenomenon should have been 
made. Dr. Weir Mitchell's observations in his work 
on "Injuries to the Nerves" ( 1872) are the most copi- 
ous and minute with which I am acquainted. They 
reveal such interesting variations in the conscious- 
ness in question, that I began some years ago to 
seek for additional observations, in the hope that 
out of a large number of data, some might emerge 
which would throw on these variations an explana- 
tory light. 

The differences in question are principally these : 

1. Some patients preserve consciousness of the 
limb after it has been lost ; others do not, 

2. In some it appears always in one fixed posi- 
tion; in others its apparent position changes. 

1 [Reprinted from Proceedings of the American Society for 
Psychical Research, 1887, 1, 249-258. Results bearing on sensa- 
tion, perception, and will, referred to briefly in the Principles 
(1890), Vol. II., pp. 105, note, 516, note. Ed.] 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1887] 

3. In some the position can be made to seem to 
change by an effort of will ; in others no effort of will 
can make it change ; in rare cases it would even seem 
that the very attempt to will the change has grown 
impossible. 

I have obtained first-hand information from a 
hundred and eighty-five amputated persons. Some 
of this was gained by personal interviews ; but much 
the larger portion consists of replies to a circular 
of questions of which I sent out some eight hundred 
copies to addresses furnished me by some of the 
leading makers of artificial limbs. 1 

The results are disappointing, in that they fail to 
explain the causes of the enumerated differences. 
But they tell certain things and suggest reflections 
which I here set down for the use of future in- 
quirers. 2 

First, as to the relative frequency of the feeling of 
the lost parts. It existed at the time of answering 
my interrogatories in about three-quarters of the 

1 For these addresses I have to thank Messrs. Fisk & Arnold, 
of Boston; Marks, and Wicket & Bradley, of New York; 
Clement, and Osborne, of Philadelphia ; and Douglass, of Spring- 
field, Mass. 

3 One lesson from them is that in a delicate inquiry like this, 
little is to be gained by distributing circulars. A single patient 
with the right sort of lesion and a scientific mind, carefully 
cross-examined, is more likely to deepen our knowledge than a 
thousand circulars answered as the average patient answers 
them, even though the answers be never so thoroughly collated 
by the investigator. This is becoming apparent in many lines 
of psychological inquiry ; and we shall probably, ere long, learn 
the limits within which the method of circulars is likely to be 
used with fruit. 

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[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

cases of which I have reports. I say in about the 
proportion of cases, for many of the answers were 
not quite clear. It had existed in a much larger 
proportionate number, but had faded out before the 
time of answering. Some had ceased to feel it "im- 
mediately," or "an hour or two" after the amputa- 
tion. In others it had lasted weeks, months, or 
years. The oldest case I have is that of a man who 
had had a thigh amputation performed at the age of 
thirteen years, and who, after he was seventy, 
affirmed his feeling of the lost foot to be still every 
whit as distinct as his feeling of the foot which 
remained. Amongst my one hundred and seventy- 
nine cases only seven are of the upper extremity. 
In all of these, the sense of the lost hand remained. 
The consciousness of the lost limb varies from 
acute pain, pricking, itching, burning, cramp, un- 
easiness, numbness, etc., in the toes, heel, or other 
place, to feelings which are hardly perceptible, or 
which become perceptible only after a good deal of 
"thinking." The feeling is not due to the condition 
of the stump, for in both painful and healthy stumps 
it may be either present or absent. Where it is dis- 
tinct both the lost foot or hand and the stump are 
felt simultaneously, each in its own place. The 
hand and foot are usually the only lost parts very 
distinctly felt, the intervening tracts seeming to 
disappear. A man, for example, whose arm was cut 
off at the shoulder- joint told me that he felt his hand 
budding immediately from his shoulder. This is, 
however, not constantly the case by any means. 

287 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1887 1 

Many patients with thigh-amputation feel, more or 
less distinctly, their knee, or their calf. But even 
where they do not, the foot may seem separate from 
the stump, though possibly located nearer it than 
natural. A second shoulder- joint case says his arm 
seems to lie on his breast, centrally with fingers 
closed on palm just as it did eight or ten hours 
before amputation. 

It is a common experience, during the first weeks 
after amputation, for the patient to forget that his 
leg is gone. Many patients tell how they met with 
accidents, by rising suddenly and starting to walk 
as if their leg were still there, or by getting out of 
bed in the same way. Others tell how they have 
involuntarily put down their hand to scratch their 
departed foot. One man writes that he found him- 
self preparing with scissors to cut its nails, so dis- 
tinctly did he feel them. Generally the position of 
the lost leg follows that of the stump and artificial 
leg. If one is flexed the other seems flexed ; if one 
is extended so is the other ; if one swings in walking 
the other swings with it. In a few correspondents, 
however, the lost leg maintains a more or less fixed 
position of its own, independent of the artificial leg. 
One such man told me that he felt as if he had three 
legs in all, getting sometimes confused, in coming 
down stairs, between the artificial leg which he put 
forward, and the imaginary one which he felt bent 
backwards and in danger of scraping its toes upon 
the steps just left behind. Dr. Mitchell tells of cer- 
tain arms which appeared fixedly in the last pain- 

288 



[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

fill attitude they had occupied before amputation. 
One of my correspondents writes that he feels con- 
stantly a blister on his heel which was there at the 
time of his accident ; another that he had chilblains 
at the time of the accident, and feels them still on 
his toes. 

The differences in the apparent mobility of the 
lost part, when felt, are strange. About a hundred 
of the cases who feel (say) their feet, affirm that 
they can "work" or "wiggle" their toes at will. 
About fifty of them deny that they have any such 
power. This again is not due to the condition of the 
stump, for both painful and healthy stumps are 
found equally among those who can and among 
those who cannot "work their toes." Almost al- 
ways when the will is exerted to move the toes, 
actual contraction may be perceived in the muscles 
of the stump. One might, therefore, expect that 
where the toe-moving muscles were cut off, the sense 
of the toes being moved might disappear. But this 
is not the case. I have cases of thigh amputation, 
in which all the foot-moving muscles are gone, and 
yet in which the feet or toes seem to move at will. 
And I have cases of lower-leg amputation in which, 
though the foot-moving muscles contract in the 
stump, the toes or feet feel motionless. 

But although, in a gross sense, we are thus forced 
to conclude that neither the state of the stump nor 
the place of the amputation absolutely determines 
the differences of consciousness which different in- 
dividuals show, it is nevertheless hard to believe 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1887 1 

that they are not among the more important in- 
fluencing conditions of the illusion which we are 
studying. On a priori grounds it seems as if they 
must be so. What is the phenomenon? It is what 
is commonly known as the extradition, or projection 
outwards, of a sensation whose immediate condition 
is the stimulation of a central organ of perception 
by an incoming nerve or nerves. As the optical 
centres respond to stimulation by the feeling of 
forms and colors and the acoustic centres by that of 
sounds, so do certain other centres respond by the 
feeling of a foot, with its toes, heel, etc. This feel- 
ing is what Johannes Miiller called the "specific 
energy" of the neural tracts involved. It makes no 
difference how the tracts are excited, that feeling 
of a foot is their only possible response. So long as 
they feel at all, what they feel is the foot. 1 In the 

1 It would seem that, even in the case of congenital defect of 
the extremities, the brain-centres might feel in the usual an- 
cestral way. "A nineteen-year-old girl and a man in the forties, 
who had each but one normal hand, the other, instead of fingers, 
having only little prominences of skin without bones or muscles, 
thought they bent their absent fingers when they bent the de- 
formed stump. Tickling these eminences, or binding a string 
about the forearm, caused the same sensations as in amputated 
persons, and a pressure on the ulnar nerve made the outer 
fingers tingle. In the same way persons born with a much 
shortened arm have stated the length of this member to be 
greater than it really was. An individual whose right forearm 
almost entirely failed, so that the dwarfed hand seemed to 
spring from the elbow, was conscious of the misshapen arm 
as normal and almost as long as the other." I quote this re- 
markable passage from Valentin's Lehrbuch der Physiologie, 
Vol. II., p. 609. Valentin gives a number of references to the 
contemporaneous literature of the subject, and his own remarks, 
which occupy several pages, are well worth reading, even now. 

290 



[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

normal state the foot thus felt is located where the 
eye can see and the hand touch it. When the foot 
which the eye sees and the hand touches is cut off, 
still the immediate inner feeling of it persists so 
long as the brain-centres retain their functions ; and 
in the absence of any counter-motive, it ought, one 
would think, to continue located about where it used 
to be. There would be a counter-motive, if nerves 
which in the unamputated man went to the foot and 
were excited every time the foot was touched, were 
to find themselves, after the amputation, excited 
every time the stump was touched. The foot-feeling 
(which the nerves would continue to give) being 
then associated with the stump-contacts, would end 
(by virtue of a law of perception of which I made 
mention in Mind for 1887, p. 196 ) * by locating itself 
at the place at which those contacts were believed, 
on the testimony of the eye and the hand, to occur. 
In other words, the foot-feeling would fuse with the 
feeling resident in the stump. In but few -cases does 
this seem to occur f and the reason is easily found. 
At the places where the amputation is apt to be 
made, the nerves which supply the foot are all buried 
deeply in the tissues. Superficial contact with the 
stump never excites, therefore, the sensibility of the 
foot-nerves. All ordinary contacts of the stump, 
thus failing to awaken the foot-feeling in any notice- 

VCf. Principles (1890), Vol. II., pp. 183-184. Ed.] 

"I have found none. Dr. Mitchell reports one at least, 
in which the lost hand lay "seemingly within the stump" 
(p. 356. Cf. also p. 351). This was an upper-arm amputation. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1887 1 

able way, that feeling fails to grow associated with 
the stump's experiences; and when (on exceptional 
occasions) deep pressure of the stump awakens not 
only its own local cutaneous feeling but the foot- 
feelings due to the deeper-lying nerve, the two feel- 
ings still keep distinct in location as in quality. 

There is, usually, in fact, a positive reason against 
their local fusion. More than one of my correspon- 
dents writes that the lost foot is best felt when the 
end of the stump receives the thrust of the artificial 
leg. Whenever the old foot is thus most felt at the 
moment when the artificial foot is seen to touch the 
ground, that place of contact (being both important 
and interesting) should be the place with which the 
foot-feeling would associate itself (by virtue of the 
mental law already referred to) . In other words, we 
should project our foot-feeling upon the ground, as 
we used to before we lost the member, and we should 
feel it follow the movements of the artificial limb. 1 
An observation of Dr. Mitchell's corroborates this 
view. One of his patients "lost his leg at the age of 
eleven, and remembers that the foot by degrees ap- 
proached, and at last reached the knee. When he be- 
gan to wear an artificial leg it reassumed in time its 
old position, and he is never at present aware of the 
leg as shortened, unless for some time he talks and 
thinks of the stump, and of the missing leg, when 

1 The principle here is the same as that by which we project 
to the extremity of any instrument with which we are probing, 
tracing, cutting, etc., the sensations which the instrument com- 
municates to our hand when it presses the foreign matter with 
which it is in contact. 

292 



[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

. . . the direction of attention to the part causes a 
feeling of discomfort, and the subjective sensation 
of active and unpleasant movement of the toes. With 
these feelings returns at once the delusion of the 
foot as being placed at the knee." 1 

The latter half of this man's experience shows that 
the principles I have invoked (though probably 
quite sound as far as they go) are not exhaustive, 
and that, between fusion with the stump and pro- 
jection to the end of the artificial limb, the inter- 
mediate positions of the foot remain unaccounted 
for. It will not do to call them vague remains of the 
old normal habit of projection, for often they are 
not vague, but quite precise. Leaving this phenome- 
non on one side, however, let us see what more our 
principles can do. 

In the first place they oblige us to invert the popu- 
lar way of looking at the problem. The popular 
mind wonders how the lost feet can still be felt. 
For us, the cases for wonder are those in which the 
lost feet are not felt. The first explanation which 
one clutches at, for the loss, is that the nerve- 
centres for perception may degenerate and grow 
atrophic when the sensory nerve-terminations which 
normally stimulate them are cut off. Extirpation 
of the eyeballs causes such atrophy in the occipital 
lobes of the brain. The spinal cord has been re- 
peatedly found shrunken at the point of entrance of 
the nerves from amputated limbs. And there are 
a few carefully reported cases in which the degener- 

1 Injuries of Nerves, Philadelphia, 1872, p. 352. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1887 ] 

ation has been traced ascending to the cortical 
centres, along with an equal number of cases in 
which no such ascending degeneration could be 
found. 1 A degenerated centre can of course no 
longer give rise to its old feelings; and where the 
centres are degenerated, that fact explains ail- 
sufficiently why the lost member can no longer be 
felt. But it is impossible to range all the cases of 
non-feeling under this head. Some of them date 
from the first hours after the operation, when de- 
generation is out of the question. In some the 
perceptive centres are proved to be there by exciting 
electrically the nerve-trunks buried in the stump. 
"I recently faradized," says Dr. Mitchell, "a case 
of disarticulated shoulder without warning my 
patient of the possible result. For two years he had 
altogether ceased to feel the limb. As the current 
affected the brachial plexus of nerves he suddenly 
cried aloud, 'Oh the hand, — the hand!' and at- 
tempted to seize the missing member. The phantom 
I had conjured up swiftly disappeared, but no spirit 
could have more amazed the man, so real did it 
seem." 2 

In such a case as this last, the only hypothesis 
that remains to us is to suppose that the nerve-ends 
are so softly embedded in the stump as, under or- 
dinary conditions, to carry up no impressions to the 
brain, or none strong enough to be noticeable. 
Were they carried, the patient would feel, and feel 

1 Frangois-Franck : Legons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cer- 
veau, 1887, p. 291. 

2 Op. cit., p. 349. 

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[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

a foot. Not feeling the foot, and yet being capable 
of feeling it (as the faradization proves), it must 
be either that no impressions are carried, or else that 
for some reason they do not appeal to conscious- 
ness. Now it is a general law of consciousness that 
feelings of which we make no practicable use tend 
to become more and more overlooked. Helmholtz 
has explained our habitual insensibility to double 
images, to the so-called muscce volitantes caused by 
specks in the humors of the eye, to the upper har- 
monics which accompany various sounds, as so 
many effects of the persistent abstraction of our 
attention from impressions which are of no use. It 
may be that in certain subjects this sort of abstrac- 
tion is able to complete our oblivescence of a lost 
foot; our feeling of it has been already reduced 
almost to the vanishing point, by reason of the 
shielded condition of the nerve-ends, just assigned. 
The feeling of the lost foot tells us absolutely noth- 
ing which can practically be of use to us. 1 It is a 
superfluous item in our conscious baggage. Why 
may it not be that some of us are able to cast it out 
of our mind on that account? Until a few years 
ago all oculists believed that a similar superfluity, 
namely, the second set of images seen by the squint- 
ing eye in squinters, was cast out of consciousness 
so persistently that the eye grew actually blind. 
And, although the competency of the explanation 
has probably been disproved as regards the blind- 

1 Except the approach of storms ; but then it is in cases where 
the feeling is preserved. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1887 1 

ness, yet there is no doubt that it is quite competent 
to prove an almost invincible unconsciousness of the 
images cast upon a squinting eye. 

Unconsciousness from habitual inattention is, 
then, probably one factor in the oblivescence of lost 
extremities, — a factor which, however, we must re- 
gard as unavailing where impressions from the 
nerve-ends are strong. 1 

Let us next consider the differences in regard to 
the illusion of voluntary movement in the lost parts. 
Most of the patients who seem to themselves able to 
move their lost feet, hands, etc., at will, produce a 
distinct contraction of the muscles of the stump 
whenever they make the voluntary effort. As the 
principle of specific energies easily accounted for 
the consciousness of the lost limb being there at all, 
so here another principle, almost as universally 
adopted by psychologists, accounts as easily for the 
consciousness of movement in it, and leaves the real 

1 1 have quoted my hundred and forty-odd patients as feeling 
their lost member, as if they all felt it positively. But many 
of those who say they feel it seem to feel it dubiously. Either 
they only feel it occasionally, or only when it pains them, or only 
when they try to move it ; or they only feel it when they "think 
a good deal about it" and make an effort to conjure it up. 
When they "grow inattentive," the feeling "flies back," or 
"jumps back to the stump." Every degree of consciousness, from 
complete and permanent hallucination, down to something 
hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented 
in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say 
they have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of 
evidence for the view that imagination and sensation are but 
differences of vividness in an identical process, than these con- 
fessions, taking them altogether, contain. Many patients say 
they can hardly tell whether they feel or fancy the limb. 

296 



[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

puzzle to reside rather in those cases in which the 
illusion of movement fails to exist. 

The principle I refer to is that of the inheritance 
of ancestral habit. It is all but unanimously ad- 
mitted at the present day that any two experiences, 
which during ancestral generations have been in- 
variably coupled together, will have become so in- 
dissolubly associated that the descendant will not 
be able to represent them in his mind apart. Now 
of all possible coupled experiences it is hard to 
imagine any pair more uniformly and incessantly 
coupled than the feeling of effected contraction 
of muscles, on the one hand, and that of the changed 
position of the parts which they move, on the other. 
From the earliest ancestors of ours which had feet, 
down to the present day, the movement of the feet 
must always have accompanied the contraction of 
the muscles; and here, if anywhere, habit's heredi- 
tary consequences ought to be found, if the principle 
that habits are transmitted from one generation to 
another is sound at all. 1 No sooner then should the 
brain-centres for perceiving muscular contractions 
be excited, than those other centres functionally 
consolidated with them ought to share the excite- 
ment, and produce a consciousness that the foot 

1 In saying that if it is sound, then the explanation which I 
offer follows, I wish to retain reserved rights as to the general 
question of its soundness, regarding which evidence seems to 
me as yet somewhat incomplete. But the explanation which I 
offer could base itself on the invariable associations of the in- 
dividual's experience, even if the hereditary transmission of 
habitual associations proved not to be a law of nature. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1887 l 

has moved. If it be objected to this that this latter 
consciousness ought to be ideal rather than sensa- 
tional in character, and ought therefore not to pro- 
duce a fully developed illusion, it is sufficient to 
point to what happens in many illusions of the same 
type. In these illusions the mind, sensibly im- 
pressed by what seems a part of a certain probable 
fact, forthwith perceives that fact in its entirety. 
The parts supplied by the mind are in these cases no 
whit inferior in vividness and reality to those act- 
ually impressing the sense. 1 In all perception, in- 
deed, but half of the object comes from without. 
The larger half usually comes out of our own head. 
We can ourselves produce an illusion of movement 
similar to those which we are studying by putting 
some unyielding substance (hard rubber, e.g.) be- 
tween our back teeth and biting hard. It is difficult 
not to believe that our front teeth approach each 
other, when we feel our biting muscles contract. 2 In 

a They are vivid and real in proportion to the inveterateness 
of their association with the parts which impress the sense. 
The most perfect illusions are those of false motion, relief, or 
concavity, changed size, distance, etc., produced when, by arti- 
ficial means, an object gives us sensations, or forces us to move 
our eyes in ways ordinarily suggestive of the presence of an 
entirely different object. We see then the latter object directly 
although it is not there. The after-image of a rectangular 
cross, of a circle, change their shapes when we project them 
on to an oblique surface; and the new shape, which is demon- 
strably a reproduction of earlier sense-impressions, feels just 
like a present sense-impression. 

2 See for another example Sternberg, in Pfluger's Archiv, Bd. 
37, S. 1. The author even goes so far as to lay down as a general 
rule that we ordinarily judge a movement to be executed as 
soon as we have given the impulse. 

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[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

ourselves the feeling of the real position of the jaws 
persists unchanged to contradict the false sug- 
gestion. But when we recall that in the amputated 
no such positive contradiction can occur, since the 
parts are gone, we see how much easier it must be 
in their case for the false sense of movement to 
flourish unchecked. 1 

But how, then, comes it that there can be any 
patients who lack the false sense in question? In 
one hundred and forty of my cases, about fifty 
lacked it completely; and even when the stump- 
muscles contract violently, many patients are un- 
able to feel any change at all in the position of the 
imaginary extremity. This is not due to the fact 
that the amputation is made above the origin of the 
hand-or-foot-moving muscles; for there are eleven 
cases where these muscles remain and contract, but 
yet no sense of movement exists. I must say that 
I can offer no clear solution of this anomaly. It 
must be left over, together with those obstinate 

1 Out of the ninety-eight of my cases who feel their limbs to 
move, there are forty-three who can produce no feeling of move- 
ment in the lost extremity without visibly contracting the 
muscles of the stump. But (leaving out doubtful cases) twelve 
of the others positively affirm that, after the most careful exam- 
ination, no contractions can be detected in the stump, whilst 
yet the extremity seems to move at will. One such case I ob- 
served myself. The man had an amputation of the upper arm. 
He seemed to himself to flex his fingers at will; but I could 
perceive no change whatever in the stump. The thought of the 
movement seemed here a sufficient suggestion ; as in those anaes- 
thetic cases where the patient thinks of a movement and wills 
it, and then (if his eyes are closed) fancies it executed, even 
though the limb be held still by the bystanders. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1887 ] 

cases of partial apparent shortening of which we 
spoke above, for future investigators to treat. 

One reflection, however, seems pertinent to the 
entire set of phenomena we have studied. They 
form a group in which the variations from one in- 
dividual to another, if they exist at all, are likely 
to become extreme. Darwin notices that no organs 
in animals are so subject to variation as rudimen- 
tary organs. Being functionless, selection has no 
hold on them, the environment exerts no influence to 
keep them up (or down) to the proper standard, 
and the consequence is that their aberrations are 
unchecked. Now phantasms of lost legs and arms 
are to the mental organism just what rudimentary 
organs are to the bodily organism. They have no 
longer any real relations with the environment, 
being mere vestiges of something which formerly 
had real relations. The environment does not cor- 
rect such a phantasm for any odd course it may get 
into. If it slips away altogether, the environment 
lets it go, and doesn't call it back. If it happen "by 
accident" to harden itself in a fixed position, or 
shorten itself, or to dissolve connection with its an- 
cestral associates in the way of muscular feeling, 
the accident is not repaired ; and experience, which 
throughout the rest of our mental life puts prompt 
bounds to too great eccentricity, here lets it lux- 
uriate unrebuked. I do not know how far one ought 
to push this idea. But (what we can call by no better 
name but) accident or idiosyncrasy certainly plays 
a great part in all our neural and mental processes, 

300 



[1887] CONSCIOUSNESS OF LOST LIMBS 

especially the higher ones. We can never seek 
among these processes for results which shall be 
invariable. Exceptions remain to every empirical 
law of our mental life, and can only be treated as 
so many individual aberrations. It is perhaps some- 
thing to have pointed out the department of lost- 
limb-consciousness as that in which the aberrant in- 
dividuals are likely to reach their maximum number. 

The apparent changes of temperature of the lost 
parts form an interesting chapter, which, however, 
I will not discuss. Suffice it to say, that in many 
patients the lost foot can be made to feel warm or 
cold by warming or cooling the stump. A draught 
of air on the stump produces the feeling of a draught 
on the foot. The lost foot also sympathizes some- 
times with the foot which remains. If one is cold, 
the other feels cold. One man writes that when- 
ever he walks through puddles and wets his sound 
foot, his lost foot feels wet too. 

My final observations are on a matter which ought 
to interest students of "psychic research." Surely 
if there be any distant material object with which 
a man might be supposed to have clairvoyant or 
telepathic relations, that object ought to be his own 
cut-off arm or leg. Accordingly, a very wide-spread 
belief will have it, that when the cut-off limb is 
maltreated in any way, the man, no matter where 
he is, will feel the injury. I have nearly a score of 
communications on this point, some believing, more 
incredulous. One man tells of experiments of warm- 
ing, etc., which the doctor in an adjoining room 

301 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1887 l 

made on the freshly cut-off leg, without his knowl- 
edge, and of which his feelings gave him no sus- 
picion. Of course, did such telepathic rapport 
exist, it need not necessarily be found in every case. 
But in none of the cases of my collection in which 
the writers seek to prove it does their conclusion 
inspire confidence. All (with perhaps one excep- 
tion which, unfortunately, I have lost) are vaguely 
told; and, indeed, among all the pains which come 
and go in the first weeks of amputation, it would be 
strange if some did not coincide with events happen- 
ing to the buried or "pickled" limb. One man writes 
me that he has dug up his buried leg eight times, 
and changed its position. He asks me to advise him 
whether to dig it up again, saying he "dreads to." 

In concluding, I repeat that I have been able to 
throw no new light of a positive sort on those in- 
dividual differences, the explanation of which was 
the aim of my inquiry. I have, perhaps, by invoking 
certain well-known principles, succeeded in making 
the fundamental illusions, that of the existence, 
and that of the movement of the lost part, seem 
less paradoxical, and the exceptions to these il- 
lusions less odd than they have hitherto appeared. 
But, on the whole, I leave the subject where I took 
it up from Dr. Weir Mitchell's hands; and one of 
the main effects of the investigation on my own 
mind is admiration for the manner in which he 
wrote about it fifteen years ago. 



302 



XVIII 

KEPOXSE AUX KEMAKQUES DE M. 

KEXOUVIEK, SUE SA THEOBIE 

DE LA VOLOXTE 1 

[1888] 
Cher monsieur, — 

Je suis extremement sensible a l'honneur grand et 
pen merite que vons m'avez fait en presentant an 
public frangais mon petit article sur la volonte, et 
en le faisant suivre d'un commentaire si flatteur. 
Je suis cependant nn si pauvre faiseur de phrases 
que je n'essaierai pas d'exprimer ma gratitude; je 
vous prierai simplement de m'accorder une page on 
deux de votre revue pour des explications a donner 
an sujet de tos Remarques. Je serai aussi bref que 
je le pourrai. 

C 1 Reprinted from La Critique Philosophique, 1888, nouv. 
serie, 4me annee, 2, 401-404. Renouvier's "Remarks" appeared 
in ibid., pp. 117-126, and were occasioned by the publication 
of a translation of James's "What the Will Effects" (1888) in 
ibid., 1, 401-420. For James"s acknowledgment of Lotze's 
priority in this subject, cf. also the Principles (1890), II, 523, 
note. The following note was appended to the title by the Editor 
of La Critique Philosophique: "Voyez les numeros 6 et 8 de la 
Critique philosophique de la presente annee. — I/insertion de 
l'aimable et interessante lettre de M. William James a ete re- 
tardee par le desir que nous avons eu d'y joindre une traduc- 
tion des passages importants signales par ce dernier dans la 
Medicinische psychologie de Lotze." The passages referred to 
are published in the same issue of La Critique Philosophique, 
and are accompanied by "Quelques mots sur la lettre qui 
precede," by Renouvier. Ed.] 

303 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1888 1 

Premierement, en ce qui concerne mon originalite, 
Lotze a ete, autant que je sache, le premier a formu- 
ler clairement la relation entre representation, voli- 
tion et mouvement effectue. On trouvera les pas- 
sages dans les §§266-7-8 de sa Medicinische psy- 
chologies publiee en 1852. Votre propre formula- 
tion, qui n'est pas essentiellement plus profonde, 
a ce qu'il me semble, mais qui est beaucoup plus 
explicite, a ete publiee sept ans plus tard, mais 
obtenue d'une maniere independante. Mes propres 
idees se sont formees Men posterieurement, par la 
lecture et de votre ouvrage et de celui de Lotze; 
de sorte que je n'ai sur ce point ni independance ni 
originalite quelconque. 

Secondement, touchant Yespece de representation 
d'un mouvement a laquelle le mouvement actuel 
fait suite, je m'en suis explique, dans mon article, 
comme si elle devait se composer des souvenirs des 
sensations internes engendrees par les mouvements 
passes dans les parties mouvantes elles-memes. Mon 
article, ayant ete ecrit pour un recueil populaire, 
a du etre simplifie outre mesure, comme de coutume 
en pareil cas; et, dans ce cas-ci, j'ai pris une des 
especes de l'idee motrice pour tenir la place du genre 
tout entier. Vous avez absolument raison de pro- 
tester contre cette vue etroite. II est certain, ainsi 
que vous y insistez, que le dernier phenomene psy- 
chique qui precede un mouvement peut etre et est 
souvent une image des effets externes du mouvement 
sur l'ceil, Foreille ou quelque partie eloignee du 
corps. Nos mouvements voiontaires de vocalisation 

304 



[1888] EEMARQUES DE M. RENOUVIER 

paraissent etre instigues par des images acousti- 
ques. Ceux des mouvements de nos membres qui 
nous sont le plus kabituels sont dus ordinairement 
a des images optiques. Lorsque je desire tout d'un 
coup toucher du doigt un point dans l'espaee, j'ai 
plus fortement conscience de l'endroit (of where) 
ou la place de ce point parait etre, a mon oeil, que 
de la maniere (of how) dont mon bras et ma main 
doivent sentir quand je le touche. On pourrait 
objecter qu'il y a des faits ici qui echappent a notre 
conscience introspective; qu'une image tactile des 
sensations internes attendues dans le membre doit 
intervenir entre l'image optique de cette place et 
le mouvement execute; mais que cette image tac- 
tile est si rapidement supplantee par les sensations 
internes actuelles, pendant que le mouvement 
s'effectue, que nous manquons a en prendre con- 
naissance comme d'un phenomene independant. 
Ceci est une hypothese qui merite consideration; 
elle doit avoir un r£sultat experimentalement veri- 
fiable. Si une personne a laquelle un signal est 
donne fait un mouvement qui laisse une marque sur 
un appareil chronographique, elle obtient une me- 
sure de ce qu'on appelle le "temps physiologique" 
de ce mouvement particulier. Or, si Pon compare 
deux mouvements (semblables d'ailleurs) dont Tun 
est represents d'avance pour nous en termes opti- 
ques, ou "externes," Fautre en termes tactiles, ou 
"internes," le premier doit avoir le temps physiolo- 
gique le plus long, dans la theorie que nous dis- 
cutons, parce que la suggestion rapide qu'elle sup- 

305 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 1888 1 

pose de l'image tactile est un evenement auquel rien 
ne correspond dans le cas ou la representation est 
consciemment tactile des le debut. Je me suis oc- 
cupe quelque temps, il y a plusieurs annees, d'exe- 
cuter des mesures comparatives de ce genre. Je 
regrette de dire qu'il ne m'a pas ete possible de 
decouvrir nne forme d'experience assez affranchie 
de complications secondaires pour me donner des 
resultats utilisables. 

Toutefois, je dirai que je n'ai trouve aucune raison 
de soupconner que le temps tut allonge lorsque 
1'idee motrice etait optique ; non plus que l'attention 
introspective que j'ai du alors accorder a Poperation 
n ? a tendu a me confirmer dans Fidee qu'une image 
tactile latente y intervient tou jours. Loin de la, 
c'est alors que pour la premiere fois je me suis mis 
fortement a douter de cette idee. 

Pendent ce temps, mon collegue le professeur 
Bowditch a fait avec le docteur Southard des ex- 
periences qui semblent montrer que, quelquefois au 
moins, il n'intervient aucune image tactile. Ces 
physiologistes ont trouve qu'ils pouvaient, les yeux 
f ermes, toucher avec plus de precision un point mar- 
que sur la table, lorsqu'ils l'avaient simplement 
re garde que lorsqu'ils Favaient simplement touche 
un moment auparavant. Pour le docteur S. l'erreur 
moyenne, avec le toucher, etait de 17 millimetres 
contre 12 millimetres avec le vue. 1 II est certain 
qu'ici une rapide image tactile ne pouvait s'etre 

1 Ce travail a 616 publie dans le Journal of Physiology, Vol. 
III., No. 3. 

306 



[1888] EEMARQUES DE M. RENOUVIER 

placee comme moyen de passage entre l'image 
optique et la decharge motrice. Comment la physi- 
ologie du cerveau s'accommodera de ces faits, c'est 
line question qui regarde les physiologistes ; ils 
devront dans tous les cas admettre que le proces 
ideationnel qui precede immediatement et provoque 
un proces moteur peut quelquefois etre un proces 
d'imagination optique. 

Troisiemement, je voudrais dire un mot de ma re- 
duction de toutes les actions psychiques au type 
reflexe. Je ne suis pas sur que, quand j'amrme et 
que vous niez, nous pretions aux memes mots les 
memes significations. J'entends, pour le faire bref, 
que l'objet de la pensee, a tout instant donne, fait 
partie d'une chaine d'objets successivement sug- 
geres qui peuvent ^tre suivis, en remontant, jusqu'& 
quelque sensation regue, et qui se termineront tot 
ou tard a quelque modification de notre mouvement. 
Par exemple, mes pensees presentes peuvent etre 
suivies, en remontant, jusqu'a l'impression causee 
dernierement sur ma retine par vos paroles im- 
primees, et se dechargent, en ce moment meme, en 
des mouvements de mes doigts qui tiennent la 
plume. La succession de nos objets mentaux est, je 
le crois fermement, expliquee par le fait physio- 
logique q'un proces cerebral en eveille un autre, 
suivant des voies en partie organisers par une 
formation interne, et en partie tracees par l'experi- 
ence organisee par une formation interne, et en 
partie tracees par l'experience externe ; — expliquee, 
dis-je, en ce sens que nous ne pouvons avoir un objet, 

307 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1888 3 

duquel ces voies ne soient la condition de possi- 
oilite. Mais cette dependance par rapport a des 
voies materielles, pour la possibilite de nos objets, 
n'implique pas necessairement que la succession 
de ces derniers soit entierement determined par des 
lois materielles. On n'a simplement qu'a admettre 
que la conscience qui accompagne les proces ma- 
teriels peut reagir de telle maniere qu'elle ajoute 
a volonte a l'intensite ou a la duree de certains 
proces particuliers; un champ de selection s'ouvre 
aussitot, qui nous mene bien loin de la determina- 
tion mecanique. Un proces appuye et accentue par 
la conscience eveillera ses propres associes et pro- 
duira ses consequences, a Texclusion des autres ? et 
renchainement des pensees prendra de la sorte une 
forme entierement differente de celle qu'elle 
aurait pu prendre si la conscience n'eut ete 
la avec son efficacite. Soit qu'il existe ou non 
une volonte-force, avec des variations indepen- 
dantes, il me semble qu'un parfait theatre pour son 
activite est fourni par un systeme de voies dans les- 
quelles des courants se meuvent et produisent des 
tensions et des decharges. La force independante 
n'a besoin que d'alterer par augmentation ou par 
diminution la tension donnee en un point, pour 
changer entierement la resultante en direction de 
la decharge. Tout ce que notre libre vouloir peut 
legitimement revendiquer, c'est de disposer de possi- 
bilites qui nous sont offertes en maniere d'alterna- 
tives par le flux mecanique des choses. J'espere 
qu'en ce sens-la, vous ne verrez nulle objection a 

308 



[1888] KEMARQUES DE M. RENOUVIER 

etendre la notion de Taction reflexe a notre vie supe- 
rieure. Si librement qu'un acte puisse se produire, 
sa suggestion premiere est certainement due a des 
courants reflexes, et des courants reflexes sont ce 
qui le rend actuel. L'action regulatrice de tels cou- 
rants par la volonte ne peut etre autre chose qu'une 
selection de certains d'entre eux, deja tout pres 
d'etre un peu plus forts que les autres. 

Croyez-moi, cher monsieur, etc. 

William James. 
Cambridge (Mass.) U. S. of A., 23 septembre 1888. 



309 



XIX 

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEOEY OF 

EXTENSION x 

[1889] 

Since even the worm will "turn/' the space- 
theorist can hardly be expected to remain motion- 
less when his Editor stirs him up. Had I seen my 
July Mind earlier than I did, these remarks would 
have been in time for the October number. Ap- 
pearing in January, I can only hope that the reader 
may not regard them as reviving an issue that is 
stale. The Editor, in his observations on "The Psy- 
chological Theory of Extension" in No. 51, made, 
as it seems to me, some admissions that ought to be 
recorded, as well as some assumptions that ought 
to be questioned, in the interests of clear thinking 
in this dark field. One admission (if I rightly 
understand page 420) amounts to nothing less than 
giving up the whole positive and constructive part 
of the Brown-Bain- Spencer-Mill theory of space- 
perception, and confessing that the criticisms 
usually made upon it are fatal. That theory con- 

i 1 Reprinted from Mvnd, 1889, lit, 107-109. Written in reply 
to a criticism by G. C. Robertson, the Editor, in Mind, 1888, IS, 
418-424, of James's articles on "The Perception of Space," ibid., 
1887. The present paper is a part of a general discussion pro- 
voked by Robertson's criticism, and participated in by James 
Ward, among others. Ed.] 

310 



[1889] THEORY OF EXTENSION 

tends that a variety of intensive elements can, by 
grouping [association] assume in consciousness the 
appearance of an extended order. "How is the trans- 
formation to be effected? or rather, can it in any 
way be effected?" asks the Editor. "I do not know 
that it can," he replies, "if sought for upon that 
line." As the account of space-perception by these 
authors is usually reckoned one of the greatest tri- 
umphs of the Analytic School of Psychology, this 
defection, by a writer whose general tendencies are 
loyal to the school, is worthy of emphatic notice. The 
Editor's second admission is, that, if we could sup- 
pose ourselves reduced to the eye with its explora- 
tory movements as our sole and only means of con- 
structing a spatial order, such a construction might 
come to pass (p. 424) — an admission quite at vari- 
ance with the widely prevalent notion that analytic 
psychology has proved the space-perceptions of the 
eye to be but reproduced experiences of touch and 
locomotion. So many doctrines reign by the mere 
inertia of supposed authority, that when, as in these 
two points, the chain of authority gets broken, 
public attention should be drawn to the fact. 

The chief assumption of the Editor's which I wish 
to question is his proposition that, although ex- 
periences of an intensive order will not by them- 
selves acquire the extensive character, they will yet, 
if so experienced as to be referred to an object (in 
the sense of "bare obstacle to muscular activity of a 
touching organ"), begin to assume that character. 
If we construe this view definitely, everything about 

311 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1889 l 

it seems to me questionable. Either the obstacle 
feels big originally or it does not. If it have origi- 
nally no bigness, the same difficulty arises which the 
Editor admits to be fatal to ordinary theory: how 
can intensive elements be transformed into an ex- 
tensive result? If, on the contrary, the obstacle 
have a sensible bigness, then, of course, that would 
explain how the touch of it, the look of it, or any 
other sensation which the mind incorporates in it, 
should share the bigness and appear itself extended. 
But then the question would arise — Why on earth 
should this feeling of muscular resistance be the 
only one which originally comes to us with a big- 
ness? What grounds a posteriori or a priori can we 
show for assigning to it so pre-eminent an advan- 
tage, in the teeth of all the spontaneous appear- 
ances, which make us feel as if the blueness of the 
sky were spread out in itself, and as if the rolling of 
the thunder or the soreness of an abscess were intrin- 
sically great? But the Editor keeps his whole ac- 
count so studiously and cautiously vague that I 
confess I find it hard to construe his obstacle-object 
as definitely as this. It must, he says, not be treated 
as external "at the outset," for the mere experience 
of resisted muscular activity is analysable into ele- 
ments "which are found to be merely intensive — 
intensity of passive touch varying with intensity of 
effort " (p. 421). Nevertheless touch and effort are 
so related as to "suggest a cleft in conscious experi- 
ence, which has but to be widened and defined for 
the opposition of self and not-self to be established." 

312 



[1889] THEORY OF EXTENSION 

It is when referred to the "not-self" of the experi- 
ence thus denned that the originally intensive quali- 
ties of touch, look, sound, etc., begin, according to 
the Editor, to appear extended, and finally become 
more definitely extended in proportion as the resist- 
ing body gets more definitely to seem external. 

Such accounts, however vaguely expressed, are 
indubitably true, if one goes far enough back in 
time. Since things are perceived later which were 
not perceived earlier, it is certain a priori that there 
was a moment when the perception of them began ; 
and we are, therefore, sure in advance, of being 
right, if we say of any perception that first it didn't 
exist, and that then there was a mere suggestion and 
nascency of it, which grew more definite, until, at 
last, the thing was fully established. The only merit 
of such statements lies in getting them historically 
exact, and in determining the very moment at which 
each successive element of the final fact came in. 
Science can never explain the qualities of the succes- 
sive elements, if they show new qualities, appearing 
then for the first time. It can only name the mo- 
ment and conditions of their appearance, and its 
whole problem is to name these aright. Now, we 
probably all agree that the condition of our per- 
ceiving the quality of bigness, the extensive quality, 
in any sensible thing is some peculiar process in 
our brain at the moment. But whereas, in the arti- 
cles which the Editor criticises, I maintained that 
the moment is the very first moment in which we get 
a sensation of any sort whatever, the Editor con- 

313 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1889 ^ 

tends possibly that it is the first time we have the 
feeling of resisted muscular effort, but more prob- 
ably (as I read his text) that it is much later in the 
day, after many sensations, all purely "intensive," 
have come and gone. In my articles I have given 
(with probably far too great prolixity) the grounds 
for the date which I assign, and criticised the 
grounds given by Wundt and Helmholtz for the 
later one which they prefer. I miss in the Editor's 
remarks (as in all English writings upholding the 
same view) any attempt at explicit proof that the 
earlier date is impossible, and that sensations can- 
not come with any apparent bigness when they first 
appear. May not the supposed impossibility be 
rather an assumption and a prejudice, due to un- 
criticised tradition? If there be definite reasons for 
it in the Editor's mind, I hope sincerely that he will 
publish them without delay. But if, on the con- 
trary, a mere dim bigness can appear in all our first 
sensations, then the date of its appearance is most 
probably then; for discriminations, associations, 
and selections among the various bignesses, occur- 
ring later on, will perfectly explain (as I have tried 
to show) how the definitive perception of real outer 
space and of the bodies in it grows up in the mind. 
Eye-experience, touch-experience, and muscular ex- 
perience go on abreast in this evolution, and their 
several objects grow intimately identified with each 
other. But I fail to see in this fact any reason for 
that dependence of the visual space-feelings "on a 
tactile base," such as my critic in his last paragraph 

314 



[1889] THEORY OF EXTENSION 

seems to find. One who asks a blind person to com- 
pare pasteboard angles and the directions of their 
sides with each other, and who observes the extraor- 
dinary inferiority of his tactile perceptions to our 
visual ones, will be very loath to believe that the 
latter have the former for their base. 

I am at a loss to know who the Editor means by 
the theorists ( "space- theorists generally/' he calls 
them) who commit the mistake of "seeking for an 
extension that is extension of nothing at all." Cer- 
tainly this mistake cannot be imputed to anyone 
who, like myself, holds extension to be coeval with 
sensation. The matter of the sensation must always 
be there to fill the extension felt. The extension is 
of the warmth, the noise, the blue luminosity, the 
contact, the muscular mass contracting, or what- 
ever else the phenomenon may be. 

Still other points do I find obscure in the Edi- 
tor's remarks — obscure, I am sure, from no other 
reason but the brevity to which he has confined 
them. May he be enabled soon to set them forth at 
fairer length ! 



315 



XX 

A PLEA FOE PSYCHOLOGY AS A 
"NATUBAL SCIENCE' 



J? 1 



[1892] 

In the first number of this journal, Professor 
Ladd takes my Principles of Psychology as a text 
for certain critical reflections upon the cerebralistic 
point of view which is becoming so popular in 
psychology to-day. I appreciate fully the kind per- 
sonal tone of the article, and I admit that many of 
the thrusts strike home, though it shocks me a bit, 
I confess, to find that in some particulars my vol- 
umes have given my critic so false an impression of 
my beliefs. I have never claimed, for instance, as 
Professor Ladd seems to think I claim, that psy- 
chology as it stands to-day is a natural science, or 
in an exact way a science at all. Psychology, in- 
deed, is to-day hardly more than what physics was 
before Galileo, what chemistry was before Lavoisier. 
It is a mass of phenomenal description, gossip, and 
myth, including, however, real material enough to 
justify one in the hope that with judgment and 
good- will on the part of those interested, its study 

I 1 Reprinted from Philosophical Review, 1892, 1, 146-153. Oc- 
casioned hy an article by G. T. Ladd, entitled "Psychology as 
so-called 'Natural Science,' " ibid., pp. 24-53, in which the writer 
criticises James's Principles (1890). Ed.] 

316 



[1892] PSYCHOLOGY AS NATURAL SCIENCE 

may be so organized even now as to become worthy 
of the name of natural science at no very distant 
day. I hoped that my book would leave on my 
readers an impression somewhat like this of my own 
state of mind. I wished, by treating Psychology 
like a natural science, to help her to become one. 
But what one book may have said or not said is a 
matter of small moment. My two volumes are 
doubtless uncouth enough; and since Professor 
Ladd wrote his article my general position has 
probably been made more clear in the abridgment 
of them, which Messrs. Holt & Co. have recently 
published under the name of "Psychology: Briefer 
Course." 1 Let us drop the wearisome book, there- 
fore, and turn to the question itself, for that is what 
we all have most at heart. What may one lawfully 
mean by saying that Psychology ought to be treated 
after the fashion of a "natural science"? I think that 
I can state what I mean ; and I even hope that I can 
enlist the sympathy of men like Professor Ladd in 
the cause, when once the argument is fairly set forth. 
What is a natural science, to begin with? It is a 
mere fragment of truth broken out from the whole 
mass of it for the sake of practical effectiveness ex- 
clusively. Divide et impera. Every special science, 
in order to get at its own particulars at all, must 
make a number of convenient assumptions and de- 
cline to be responsible for questions which the 
human mind will continue to ask about them. Thus 

1 See especially the chapters headed "Introductory" and 
"Epilogue." 

317 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1892 3 

physics assumes a material world, but never tries to 
show how our experience of such a world is "pos- 
sible." It assumes the inter-action of bodies, and the 
completion by them of continuous changes, without 
pretending to know how such results can be. Be- 
tween the things thus assumed, now, the various 
sciences find definite "laws" of sequence ; and so are 
enabled to furnish general Philosophy with mate- 
rials properly shaped and simplified for her ulterior 
tasks. If, therefore, psychology is ever to conform 
to the type of the other natural sciences, it must 
also renounce certain ultimate solutions, and place 
itself on the usual common-sense basis by uncriti- 
cally begging such data as the existence of a physi- 
cal world, of states of mind, and of the fact that 
these latter take cognizance of other things. What 
the "physical world" may be in itself, how "states of 
mind" can exist at all, and exactly what "taking 
cognizance" may imply, are inevitable further 
questions; but they are questions of the kind for 
which general philosophy, not natural science, is 
held responsible. 

Now if there is any natural science in possession 
of a subject-matter well set off and contrasted with 
all others, it is psychology. However much our self- 
consciousness, our freedom, our ability to conceive 
universals, or what not, may ally us with the In- 
finite and Absolute, there is yet an aspect of our 
being, even of our mental being, which falls wholly 
within the sphere of natural history. As constitut- 
ing the inner life of individual persons who are born 

318 



[1892] PSYCHOLOGY AS NATURAL SCIENCE 

and die, our conscious states are temporal events 
arising in the ordinary course of nature, — events, 
moreover, the conditions of whose happening or 
non-happening from one moment to another, lie cer- 
tainly in large part in the physical world. Not only 
this; they are events of such tremendous practical 
moment to us that the control of these conditions 
on a large scale would be an achievement compared 
with which the control of the rest of physical nature 
would appear comparatively insignificant. All nat- 
ural sciences aim at practical prediction and con- 
trol, and in none of them is this more the case than 
in psychology to-day. We live surrounded by an 
enormous body of persons who are most definitely 
interested in the control of states of mind, and in- 
cessantly craving for a sort of psychological science 
which will teach them how to act. What every edu- 
cator, every jail- warden, every doctor, every clergy- 
man, every asylum-superintendent, asks of psychol- 
ogy is practical rules. Such men care little or noth- 
ing about the ultimate philosophic grounds of men- 
tal phenomena, but they do care immensely about 
improving the ideas, dispositions, and conduct of 
the particular individuals in their charge. 

Now out of what may be called the biological' 
study of human nature there has at last been pre- 
cipitated a very important mass of material strung 
on a guiding conception which already to some de- 
gree meets these persons' needs. The brain-path 
theory based on reflex action, the conception of the 
human individual as an organized mass of tenden- 

319 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1892 l 

cies to react mentally and muscularly on his en- 
vironment in ways which may be either preserva- 
tive or destructive, not only helps them to analyze 
their cases, but often leads them to the right remedy 
when perversion has set in. How much more this 
conception may yet help them these men do not 
know, but they indulge great hopes. Together with 
the physiologists and naturalists they already form 
a band of workers, full of enthusiasm and confidence 
in each other, and are pouring in materials about 
human nature so copious that the entire working 
life of a student may easily go to keeping abreast of 
the tide. The "psychical researchers," though kept 
at present somewhat out in the cold, will inevitably 
conquer the recognition which their labors also 
deserve, and will make, perhaps, the most impor- 
tant contributions of all to the pile. But, as I just 
remarked, few of these persons have any aptitude or 
fondness for general philosophy ; they have quite as 
little as the pure-blooded philosophers have for dis- 
covering particular facts. 

The actual existence of two utterly distinct types 
of mind, with their distinct needs, both of them hav- 
ing legitimate business to transact with psychology, 
must then be recognized; and the only question 
there can be is the practical one of how to distribute 
the labor so as to waste it least and get the most 
efficient results. For my part, I yield to no man in 
my expectations of what general philosophy will 
some day do in helping us to rational conceptions 
of the world. But when I look abroad and see how 

320 



[ISM] PSYCHOLOGY AS XATURAL SCIENCE 

almost all the fresh life that has come into psychol- 
ogy of recent years has come from the biologists, 
doctors, and psychical researchers, I feel as if their 
impulse to constitute the science in their own way. 
as a branch of biology, were an unsafe one to 
thwart: and that wis lorn lies, not in forcing the 
consideration of the more metaphysical aspects of 
human consciousness upon them. but. on the con- 
trary, in carefully resetting these aspects from their 
hands, and handing them over to those of the spe- 
cialists in philosophy, where the metaphysical 
aspects of physics are already allowed to belong. 
If there could be. after stimeient ventilation of the 
subject, a generally expressed consent as to the kind 
of problems in psychology that were metaphysical 
and the kind that were analogous to those of the 
natural sciences, and if the word ••psychology" 
could then be restricted so as to cover as much as 
possible the latter and not the former problems, a 
psychology so understood might be safely handed 
over to the keeping of the men of facts, of the lab- 
oratory workers and biologists. We certainly need 
something more radical than the old division into 
••rational" and "empirical' 3 psychology, both to be 
treated by the same writer between the covers of 
the same book. We need a fair and square and 
explicit abandonment of such questions as th; 
the soul, the transcendental ego. the fusion of ideas 
or particles of mind stuff, etc.. by the practical 
man : and a fair and square determination on the 
part of the philosophers to keep such questions out 

321 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS ^92] 

of psychology and treat them only in their widest 
possible connections, amongst the objects of an ulti- 
mate critical review of all the elements of the world. 
Prof. Andrew Seth has put the thing excellently 
in his late inaugural address at Edinburgh, 
on the Present Position of the Philosophical 
Sciences. 1 "Psychology," he says, "has become more 
scientific, and has thereby become more conscious 
of her own aims, and at the same time, of her neces- 
sary limitations. Ceasing to put herself forward as 
philosophy, she has entered upon a new period of 
development as science; and, in doing so, she has 
disarmed the jealousy, and is even fast conquering 
the indifference, of the transcendental philosopher." 
Why should not Professor Ladd, why should not 
any "transcendental philosopher," be glad to help 
confirm and develop so beneficial a tendency as this? 
In Professor Ladd's own book on Physiological 
Psychology, that "real being, proceeding to unfold 
powers that are sui generis, according to laws of its 
own," for whose recognition he contends, plays no 
organic part in the work, 2 and has proved a mere 

1 Blackwood, 1891. 
3 1 mean that such a being is quite barren of particular con- 
sequences. Its character is only known by its reactions on the 
signals which the nervous system gives, and these must be 
gathered by observation after the fact. If only it were subject 
to successive reincarnations, as the theosophists say it is, so 
that we might guess what sort of a body it would unite with 
next, or what sort of persons it had helped to constitute pre- 
viously, those would be great points gained. But even those 
gains are denied us; and the real being is, for practical pur- 
poses, an entire superfluity, which a practical psychology can 
perfectly well do without. 

322 



[1892] PSYCHOLOGY AS NATUKAL SCIENCE 

stumbling-block to his biological reviewers. Why 
force it on their attention, and perpetuate thereby a 
force it on their attention, and perpetuate thereby a 
sort of wrangle from which physics and chemistry 
have long since emerged, and from which psychol- 
ogy, if left to the "facts of experience" alone, prom- 
ises so soon to escape? 

Now the sort of "fact of experience" on which in 
my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so- 
called "mental state/ 7 in whose existence not only 
common men but philosophers have uniformly be- 
lieved. Whatever conclusions an ultimate criticism 
may come to about mental states, they form a prac- 
tically admitted sort of object whose habits of co- 
existence and succession and relations with organic 
conditions form an entirely definite subject of re- 
search. Cannot philosophers and biologists both be- 
come "psychologists" on this common basis? Can- 
not both forego ulterior inquiries, and agree that, 
provisionally at least, the mental state shall be the 
ultimate datum so far as "psychology" cares to go? 
If the "scientific monists" would only agree to say 
nothing of the states being produced by the integra- 
tion and differentiation of "psychic units," and 
the "transcendental metaphysicians" agree to say 
nothing of their being acts of spiritual entities de- 
veloping according to laws of their own, peace 
might long reign, and an enormous booty of natural 
laws be harvested in with comparatively no time or 
energy lost in recrimination and dispute about first 
principles. My own volumes are indeed full of such 
recrimination and dispute, but these unfortunate 

323 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS [1892] 

episodes are for the most part incidental to the at- 
tempt to get the undivided "mental state" once for 
all accepted by my colleagues as the fundamental 
datum for their science. To have proposed such a 
useful basis for united action in psychology is in 
my own eyes the chief originality and service of the 
book ; and I cannot help hoping that Professor Ladd 
may himself yet feel the force of the considerations 
now urged. Not that to-day we have a "science" of 
the correlation of mental states with brain states; 
but that the ascertainment of the laws of such cor- 
relation forms the programme of a science well 
limited and denned. Of course, when such a science 
is formed, the whole body of its conclusions will fall 
a prey to philosophical reflection, and then Profes- 
sor Ladd's "real being" will inevitably have the best 
possible chance to come to its rights. 

One great reason why Professor Ladd cares so 
little about setting up psychology as a natural 
science of the correlations of mental with cerebral 
events, is that brain states are such desperately in- 
accessible things. I fully admit that any exact 
account of brain states is at present far beyond our 
reach; and I am surprised that Professor Ladd 
should have read into my pages the opinion that 
psychology as a natural science must aim at an ac- 
count of brain states exclusively, as the correlates 
of states of mind. Our mental states are correlated 
immediately with brain states, it is true ; but, more 
remotely, they are correlated with many other phys- 
ical events, peripheral nerve currents for example, 

324 



[1892] PSYCHOLOGY AS NATURAL SCIENCE 

and the physical stimuli which occasion these. Of 
these latter correlations we have an extensive body 
of rather orderly knowledge. And, after all, may 
we not exaggerate the degree of our ignorance of 
brain states themselves? We don't know exactly 
what a nerve current is, it is true; but we know a 
good deal about it. We know that it follows a path, 
for instance, and consumes a fraction of a second 
of time in doing so. We know that, physically con- 
sidered, our brain is only a mass of such paths, 
which incoming currents must somehow make their 
way through before they run out. We even know 
something about the consciousness with which par- 
ticular paths are specially "correlated," those in the 
occipital lobes, e.g., being connected with the con- 
sciousness of visible things. Now the provisional 
value of such knowledge as this, however inexact it 
be, is still immense. It sketches an entire pro- 
gramme of investigation, and defines already one 
great kind of law which will be ascertained. The 
order in time of the nerve currents, namely, is what 
determines the order in time, the coexistences and 
successions of the states of mind to which they are 
related. Professor Ladd probably does not doubt 
the nerve-current theory of motor habits; he prob- 
ably does not doubt that our ability to learn 
things "by heart" is due to a capacity in the 
cerebral cortex for organizing definitely succes- 
sive systems of paths of discharge. Does he 
then see any radical reason why the special 
time-order of the "ideas" in any case whatever of 

325 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS f 1892 ^ 

"association" may not be analogously explained? 
And if not, may he not go on to admit that the most 
characteristic features of our faculty of memory, 1 
of our perception of outer things, 2 of our liability to 
illusion, 3 etc., are most plausibly and naturally ex- 
plained by acquired organic habitudes, stamped by 
the order of impressions on the plastic matter of the 
brain? But if he will admit all this, then the dia- 
grams of association-paths of which he preserves so 
low an opinion are not absolutely contemptible. 
They do represent the sort of thing which deter- 
mines the order of our thoughts quite as well as 
those diagrams which chemists make of organic 
molecules represent the sort of thing which deter- 
mines the order of substitution when new com- 
pounds are made. 

It seems to me, finally, that a critic of cerebralism 
in psychology ought to do one of two things. He 
ought either to reject it in principle and entirely, 
but then be willing to throw over, for example, such 
results as the entire modern doctrine of aphasia — 
a very hard thing to do ; or else he ought to accept 
it in principle, but then cordially admit that, in 
spite of present shortcomings, we have here an im- 
mense opening upon which a stable phenomenal 
science must some day appear. We needn't pretend 

1 Such as the need of a "cue" ; the advantages, for recall, of 
repetition and multiple association ; the fact of obliviscence, etc- 

2 That the ideas of all the thing's attributes arise in the 
imagination, even when only a few of them are felt, etc. 

3 That, e.g., the most usual (and therefore probable) associ- 
ates of the present sensation are mentally imagined even when 
not actually there. 

326 



[1892] PSYCHOLOGY AS NATURAL SCIENCE 

that we have the science already ; but we can cheer 
those on who are working for its future, and clear- 
metaphysical entanglements from their path. In 
short, we can aspire. 

We never ought to doubt that Humanity will 
continue to produce all the types of thinker which 
she needs. I myself do not doubt of the "final per- 
severance" or success of the philosophers. Never- 
theless, if the hard alternative were to arise of a 
choice between "theories" and "facts" in psychol- 
ogy, between a merely rational and a merely prac- 
tical science of the mind, I do not see how any man 
could hesitate in his decision. The kind of psychol- 
ogy which could cure a case of melancholy, or charm 
a chronic insane delusion away, ought certainly to 
be preferred to the most seraphic insight into the 
nature of the soul. And that is the sort of psy- 
chology which the men who care little or nothing 
for ultimate rationality, the biologists, nerve-doc- 
tors, and psychical researchers, namely, are surely 
tending, whether we help them or not, to bring 
about. 



327 



XXI 

THE ORIGINAL DATUM OF SPACE- 
CONSCIOUSNESS x 

[1893] 

Under this title Mr. E. Ford, in the last Mind, 
propounds to Mr. Ward and myself an alternative 
which he considers fatal to our doctrines of space- 
perception. May I make a reply to the criticism so 
far as it concerns my own view? 

Mr. Ford says that "local signs" are "utterly in- 
adequate to furnish a foundation for the perception 
of position." If "to furnish a foundation" mean "to 
explain" I entirely agree with our critic. The [term] 2 
"local sign" has perhaps come to be abused in recent 
literature on the space-question. Lotze's original in- 
tent with it (if I am not mistaken) was rather 
negative than positive. He needed a term which 
would denote a numerically distinctive quality in 
each point of our sensitive surfaces, and yet which 
would not connote any positive explanation of the 
relative positions in which the objects perceived 
by the points appear arranged. But one now notices 
a tendency to use the term "local sign" as if it were 

[ J Reprinted from Mind, 1893, N.S. 2, 363-365. Written in 
reply to "The Original Datum of Space-Consciousness," by E. 
Ford, ibid., 217-218. Ed.] 

[ 2 Substituted for "word." Ed.] 

328 



[1893] DATUM OF SPACE-CONSCIOUSNESS 

meant to cover some mysterious explanation. I am 
not sure that Mr. Ford does not take it in this way, 
for he assumes that Mr. Ward and I "deduce" or 
"develop" space from the local sign system. I, for 
one, certainly disclaim anything of the kind. By 
defending what I call a sensationalist theory of 
space-perception, I mean expressly to deny that we 
can logically or rationally deduce the features of the 
finished phenomenon. Its antecedents are physi- 
ological. Mr. Ford asks : "How much does the con- 
ception of extensity involve?" As a matter of fact, 
extensity involves all that comes out of it in the way 
of finished space-determinations. But as a mere 
conception, I do not see that extensity necessarily 
involves any exact system of points with their rela- 
tions or distances, for we may empirically be con- 
scious of spaces that are exceedingly confused and 
vague as to their inner content. This is especially 
marked in dozing and in recovery from syncope or 
anaesthesia. Neither, on the other hand, do any 
number of distinct feelings, susceptible of serial ar- 
rangement, such as "local signs" are assumed to 
be, necessarily "involve" extensity, for we find in 
every department of our sensibility feelings which, 
when we arrange them serially, never appear spread 
out before us in space. That certain organs give us 
sensations of extensity, and that parts of these 
organs contribute objects which when separately 
attended to appear definitely placed within the ex- 
tensity, are facts which seem to me insusceptible 
of any logical explanation. All we can say is, 

329 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1893 ] 

that these organs act in this way, and others 
do not. 

Take, to illustrate, the cases of the eye and the 
ear. When we first hear a musical chord, it has 
a certain richness and volume, but no distinct parts 
are apprehended within it yet. By setting the at- 
tention in a certain way, however, we discern first 
one and then another of the notes. There is a qual- 
ity in each note which identifies, individualises, and 
distinguishes it from the rest. Moreover, if we 
"compare" the notes, we feel a relation between 
them, which Professor Stumpf has well called their 
"distance." One pair have more distance between 
them than another, so that we can arrange them 
serially. In the case of the notes, however, no one 
would seriously pretend that the distance was a 
sound, like that of the notes themselves. Most 
people would call it a relation intellectually and not 
sensibly apprehended; and if asked why it is not 
sensibly perceived, would simply say that we have 
no sense-organ for such relations. Now the field of 
vision is both like and unlike the chord. It is some- 
thing rich and voluminous, within which presently, 
by setting the attention, we discern first one and 
then another spot, and then, by comparing, define 
the distance between them. Only here the distance 
is a thing seen, and not a relation apprehended 
merely intellectually; for in the eye we have, as in 
the ear we have not, a sense-organ for such distances. 
Simultaneously with the spots, their distance is 
optically felt, the physiological condition of the f eel- 

330 



[1893] DATUM OF SPACE-CONSCIOUSNESS 

ing being the excited retinal tract which stretches 
between the retinal points on which the spots fall. 

But, says Mr. Ford, if the seen distance, or line, 
"is a feeling, what is the relation between this feel- 
ing and the two points which it connects? Our 
reply of course would be: That of 'besideness,' of 
local contact, which we consider must be postulated 
as a primary datum. We do not see what answer 
would be open to Mr. James." 

To which I can only reply that the answer 
"primary datum" is as open to me as to Mr. Ford. 
That two seen things, when distinguished, appear 
"beside" each other, and that two heard things do 
not, seem to me two inexplicable facts. The usual 
explanation that we pass from the one seen thing to 
the other by a muscular "sweep," the feeling of 
which is absent in the case of the heard things, is 
quite inadequate ; for (even if the facts were strictly 
true, which they are not) one does not see why the 
end of a muscular feeling should appear separated 
in space from its beginning any more than one sees 
why the beginning and end of a sound should not 
so appear. Nor can [the] 1 Mill's phrase of "mental 
chemistry" or Wundt's of psychic "synthesis" be 
held to have explanatory value. On the contrary, 
they but rename the mystery. Whatever the in- 
trinsic character of the qualities known as local 
signs may be, if they are susceptible of serial grada- 
tion, they must appear more or less "distant" from 
each other, and some will appear next each other. 

I 1 Apparently a misprint. Ed.] 
331 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1893 1 

But the distance will be space-distance, and the 
nextness will be "besideness," only when the whole 
system of qualities aroused together appears with 
spread-outness or extent. Serial position then be- 
comes sensible and palpable as place. Behind this 
"ultimate fact" we cannot go. 

When then Mr. Ford offers his final dilemma: 
"The local sign is either given as a relation or as a 
quality ; if the former, the relation of position must 
be original and the development-theory is super- 
fluous; if the latter, the theory fails," I can only 
say that I know of no development- theory for which 
I am responsible, for I never tried "to develop" 
either extensity or position out of local signs. The 
local sign is of course a quality, and one local sign 
by itself cannot be given as a relation. But that, 
when many local signs, or rather the sensitive 
organic points which correspond to them, are excited 
together, the objects tinged by the local signs appear 
in relation, and eke in relations of position, is a fact 
which no theory of mine ever attempted rationally 
to explain. 



332 



XXII 

ME. BKADLEY ON IMMEDIATE 
KESEMBLANCE x 

[1893] 

My agreement with Mr. Bradley that "the issue 
involved is one of very great and wide-reaching 
importance" must be my excuse for sending a word 
of comment on his paper in the January Mind. 
The text of his criticism is furnished by pp. 490- 
494, and 532-533 of Vol. I. of my work The Prin- 
ciples of Psychology, and the exact question is this : 
Is the "resemblance" which we predicate of two 
objects due in the last resort always to the opera- 
tions on our mind of qualitatively identical elements 
contained in each? Or, may we, on the other hand, 
admit the existence, amongst our mind's objects, of 
qualities or natures which have no definite "point" 
in common, but which we perceive to be, although 
numerically distinct, yet like each other in various 
degrees and ways? We so often discover later the 
exact point of resemblance in two composite objects 
which first struck us by their likeness as vague 

[* Reprinted from Mind, 1893, N.S. 2, 208-210. Written in 
reply to F. H. Bradley's "On Professor James's Doctrine of 
Simple Resemblance," ibid., 83-88. This and the following dis- 
cussion are referred to in The Pluralistic Universe (1909), p. 
335, note. Ed.] 

333 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS ' 1893 ] 

wholes, and we are so often able to name it as an 
identical portion in both, that the temptation to 
generalise lies very near ; and we then say that there 
can nowhere be natures immediately like or unlike 
each other, and that every case of so-called similar- 
ity, even the simplest, must constitute a problem in 
analysis, which a higher discernment might solve. 
But since the higher discernment, methodically 
abandoned to this analytic quest, ought not to stop 
at any elements of which resemblance is simply 
affirmed (for the "point" of this resemblance must 
then also be sought), it is obvious that the problem 
can only lead to one of two conclusions, either to 

(1) The postulation of point after point, encap- 
sulated within each other in infinitum, as the con- 
stitutive condition of the resemblance of any two 
objects ; or to 

(2) A last kind of element (if one could then say 
"kind") of whose self-compoundings all the objects, 
and of whose diverse numbers in the objects, all the 
likeness and unlikeness in the world are made. 

Of these two views of resemblance the former 
leads to a sort of Leibnitzian metaphysics, and the 
latter to what I call the Mind-dust theory. 

My solution, or rather Stumpf s (for in my book 
I am but the humble follower of the eminent Munich 
psychologist) , was to take neither of these objection- 
able alternatives, but (challenging the hasty hypoth- 
esis that composition must explain all) to admit 

(3) That the last elements of things may differ 
variously, and that their "kinds" and bare unmedi- 

334 



[1893] IMMEDIATE KESEMBLANCE 

ated resemblances and contrasts may be ultimate 
data of our world as well as provisional categories 
of our perception. 

Mr. Bradley is dissatisfied both with this thesis, 1 
and with the arguments given in my book to support 
it. I care much more about the thesis than about 
the arguments, so I will spare the reader all cavil at 
my critic's treatment of the latter. In particular I 
abandon the series-business to his mercy, as being 
something inessential, for I am much more con- 
cerned with furthering understanding of the subject 
than with defending my own text. 2 As regards the 
thesis itself, Mr. Bradley quarrels greatly with the 
simplicity of the elements between which in the last 
resort it contends that bare unmediated resemblance 
may obtain. I did, it is true, assume in my text 
that the elements were simple, and I called them 
simple qualities, but I regard that as an entirely 
inessential point. So far as my thesis stands up for 
ultimate unmediated likeness as against likeness 
dependent on partially identical content, it makes 
no difference whether the last elements assumed to 

1 Or have I made a gross blunder, and is he dissatisfied really 
not with "simple resemblance" but only with "resemblance 
between simples," on which, as I presently explain, I do not 
insist? 

2 One misapprehension, however, I may complain of. Mr. 
Bradley seems to accuse me of believing that the "points of 
resemblance" which form the ground of similarity must be 
"separable" parts of the similar things. Discernible parts are 
all that the argument requires ; and I surely never implied that 
the "points" in question must be susceptible of physical isola- 
tion. The accusation is so absurd that I fear I have not under- 
stood Mr. Bradley's text. 

335 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1893 ! 

be like, are simple or complex. They must only not 
contain any identical point. In other words, com- 
plexes like abc and def might resemble each other 
by principle (3) as well as simple elements like a 
and b. 

This clears up one confusion. But dire confu- 
sion still remains in my mind as to the rest of what 
Mr. Bradley may mean. He has a solution of his 
own which is like neither (1), (2), nor (3) as pro- 
pounded above. He alludes to it abundantly, but 
dispenses himself from stating it articulately, or 
illustrating it by any example, because it proceeds 
from a principle which he imagines to be the "com- 
mon property of philosophic students." Such or- 
acular expression of opinion might fairly exempt 
one from the duty of nearer research, but the great 
debt I owe to Mr. Bradley's Logic makes me strug- 
gle in the hope of yet finding valuable truth. Mr. 
Bradley appears to hold that all likeness must be 
"in and through a particular point" — at least he 
says so on page 85. Now call the "point" m, and 
the two like objects a and b. If the m in a were 
simply like the m in b, that would be that simple 
resemblance over again with which Mr. Bradley is 
not content. But if we suppose the two m's to be 
alike by virtue of another "point," finer still, that 
leads to infinite regress; and that again I under- 
stand Mr. Bradley not to favour. It then would 
remain open to say that the two m's in a and b are 
identical in nature and only numerically distinct. 
But here again pure identity displeases Mr. Brad- 

336 



[1893] IMMEDIATE RESEMBLANCE 

ley, whose great principle is that "our one chance 
lies in maintaining the vital, the inseparable con- 
nexion at every point between identity and differ- 
ence" (bottom of p. 88). Just how this principle 
works in the matter in question, Mr. Bradley does 
not divulge, and I wish that, instead of his pleasant 
irony about my familiarity with the dialectical 
method, he had himself given some exacter account. 
I have laboured with the greatest good-will to recon- 
struct his thought, but feel wholly at sea with my 
results. If he means simply the Hegelian common- 
place that whereas neither the abstract sameness 
nor the abstract otherness of two objects can con- 
stitute likeness between them, the likeness must 
seek in the "synthesis" of the sameness with the 
otherness its only possible mode of realisation, that 
seems to me but an excessively clumsy way of stat- 
ing in terms of a gi^cm-miracle the very truth which 
Stumpf and I express by saying that likeness is an 
immediately ascertained relation. You cannot for- 
ever analytically exhibit its ground, but must some- 
where at last postulate it as there, as having already 
effected itself, you know not how. Nothing is gained 
for our understanding by presenting the process 
as a sort of juggler's trick, that, namely, of the seem- 
ingly impossible coalescence, of two contradictory 
terms; and therefore I cannot believe that the 
subtle Mr. Bradley has anything as innocent as that 
in his mind. Perhaps what I write may draw him 
from his reserve! 

Of course there is a familiar path open to those 

337 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS [ 1893 ^ 

who believe that likeness must be "in and through 
a particular point/' and who yet deny that the 
"point" can be in two objects the same. They can 
call likeness an " Antinomy " ; saying that all like- 
ness of wholes is conditioned on that of their meta- 
physical parts, and that unconditionally like parts 
are unattainable, however long one may seek. But 
this leaves both immediate likeness and apparent 
identity as ever-recurring categories in our think- 
ing, never to be expelled from our empirical world, 
and I submit that Mr. Bradley has not yet shown 
these categories to be absurd. "Antinomies" should 
surely not be multiplied beyond necessity. The 
qualities of the things of this world, the "terms" 
between which likenesses and differences obtain, 
are not supposed to be engendered by the summation 
of a procession of still more inward qualities in- 
volved within each other in infinite regression, like 
the whirls of an endlessly converging spiral that 
never reaches its central point. Why need we in- 
sist that the "relations" between the terms, the like- 
nesses and differences themselves, must be engen- 
dered by such an impossible summation or synthe- 
sis? How quality logically makes itself, we do not 
know ; and we know no more in the case of the qual- 
ity of a relation of likeness, than in that of the 
quality of a sensational content. 



338 



XXIII 
IMMEDIATE BESEMBLANCE x 

[1893] 

May another word be permitted in reply to Mr. 
Bradley's second utterance on this subject, as pos- 
sibly helping to clear np the dispute? My point 
of view was merely psychological in contending, as 
I did in my book, for the admission of immediate 
resemblance as an ultimate category of our percep- 
tion, and of comparison as an ultimate function of 
our thought. The doctrine (made so plausible by 
familiar examples) that all resemblances must be 
analysable into identities concealed under non-iden- 
tities, I showed could not be extended to every imag- 
inable case. Mr. Bradley now says that immediate 
resemblance without identity seems to him "sheer 
nonsense," and that "to deny the principle of Iden- 
tity is to destroy the world," and he challenges me 
again to "state the principle" on which I "object 
to identity." To which challenge I can only reply 
that to identity as such I have no objection in the 
world, and am astonished that any one should sus- 

l 1 Reprinted from Mind, 1893, N.S. 2, 509—510. Written in 
reply to F. H. Bradley's "Professor James on Simple Re- 
semblance," Mind, 1893, N.S. 2, 366-369, in which Bradley de- 
fends the conception of identity-in-difference. A final reply 
by Mr. Bradley appeared in iMd., p. 510. Ed.] 

339 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1893 3 

pect me of such an irrational aversion. Every act 
of reasoning, every bit of analysis, proves the prac- 
tical utility and the psychological necessity of the 
assumption that identical characters may be "encap- 
sulated" in different things. But I say that there 
must be some things whose resemblance is not based 
on such discernible and abstractable identity. Now, 
the identity on which Mr. Bradley himself thinks 
that the resemblance between all things must be 
based is no such abstractable identity. It is not 
separable, it is not even discernible, he says, from 
difference. It is only one aspect of an integral 
whole on which you may lay stress for a moment, 
but if you abstract it, or put it ideally in a box by 
itself, you make it self -inconsistent, or reduce it to 
nothing. But an "identity" thus conceived is so 
different a thing from the stark self -sameness which 
"identity" denotes in logic, that it seems unfortu- 
nate to describe it by the same name. The usual 
English name for that sort of identity between two 
things which you cannot abstract or distinguish 
from their difference is their "resemblance." So 
that Mr. Bradley now makes perfectly clear that in 
seeming to attack Professor Stumpf s and my doc- 
trine he is but reaffirming it under a changed name. 
When he insists that every resemblance must have 
for its inner ground an "identity" thus complicat- 
edly conceived, he is like a man who should say 
"every resemblance must have for its inner ground 
the resemblance itself." Why, such being the case, 
he should quarrel with me I cannot fathom : for this 

340 



[1893] IMMEDIATE KE SEMBLANCE 

is exactly the opinion I have myself stood up for in 
all simple cases. Can it be the word "simple" which 
has caused all the trouble? — for I believe that in 
my book I did heedlessly use the expression "simple 
resemblance" in one place. But I never meant 
thereby to imply that the simplest phenomenon of 
resemblance might not seem, when contemplated 
long enough, fairly to curdle and swim with inner 
complexity, to embody inseparable oppositions, or 
whatever more of vital mystery any one may find. 
The simplest ideas, as I meant to use the word 
simple, begin to look the queerest when gazed at in 
this way. But such gazing is a "metaphysical" occu- 
pation, in which we shall all indulge, I am sure, with 
the greatest profit, when Mr. Bradley's new book 
comes out. / never meant to go beyond psychology ; 
and on that relatively superficial plane I now con- 
fidently greet Mr. Bradley, no longer as the foe 
which by a mere verbal ambiguity he has seemed, 
but as a powerful and welcome ally. 



341 



XXIV 

LADD'S "PSYCHOLOGY: DESCEIPTIVE 
AND EXPLANATOBY" x 

[1894] 

As regards the originality of this treatise, it is 
strictly true that it is independent from beginning 
to end. The period of assimilation is past for the 
author; the raw materials have been brought into 
solution, and have crystallized out again spontane- 
ously and naturally in the form that characterizes 
his mind. In this sense his pages are mellow and 
alive, and full of native observation and expression 
of belief. But with all the concreteness, honesty, 
veracity, and shrewd humor that I find, I can, with 
the best will in the world, find no one idea or argu- 
ment that abides with me as an unforgetable addi- 
tion to the subject. What does strike me with the 
force of freshness is the amazing thoroughness 
with which Professor Ladd realizes the intricacy of 
his facts. It seems to me little short of wonderful 
that a man should be able to make so many subdi- 
visions, and find so many distinct things to say on 
the descriptive level. In this sense he is original, 

[ lr The closing paragraphs of a review of G. T. Ladd's 
Psychology: Descriptive and Explanatory. Reprinted from 
Psychological Review, 1894, 1, 286-293. Ed.] 

342 



[1894] LADD'S PSYCHOLOGY 

for no one has yet attained to writing up the subject 
in as fine-grained a way as this. But to be perfectly 
frank — and here I fully realize that the critic writes 
down his own shortcomings even more plainly than 
those of the author on whom he presumes to ani- 
madvert with his subjective epithets — I find this 
whole descriptive sort of treatment tedious as few 
things can be tedious, tedious not as really hard 
things, like physics and chemistry, are tedious, but 
tedious as the throwing of feathers hour after hour 
is tedious; and I confess that when I think of 
the probable number of virgin-minded youths and 
maidens, hungry for spiritual food, who, through 
the length and breadth of this great land, will now 
certainly be led over all these pages of fine print 
merely to get back, 

"Statt der lebendigen Natur 
Da Gott den Menschen schuf hinein," 

all these terrific abstract words and sentences, I feel 
a sort of shudder at the violence done to human 
want. It is not that Ladd qua Ladd is a tedious 
writer, — I could name many eminent psychologists 
who are more tedious to me than he, — but that mere 
description as such, mere translation into words of 
what we already possess in living fulness in our 
bosoms, is bound to be tedious under any circum- 
stances. To speak more soberly, could not the 
words have been much fewer, and yet have con- 
tained all the abstract truth one needs to know? 
These groans of mine no doubt proceed from the 

343 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £1894] 

same idiosyncrasy that makes me demand that psy- 
chology shall be a "science" in a sense different from 
that by which Professor Ladd is satisfied. I desid- 
erate "conditions" ; for Ladd "analysis" and "trac- 
ing of genesis and growth" are enough (p. 8). I 
cry for a "Galileo or a Lavoisier" to lift us from this 
flat descriptive level, whilst my colleague says that 
he does not sympathize in the least with such "a 
confession of weakness — for example — because 'psy- 
chology is still in the condition of chemistry before 
Lavoisier/ nor look forward with the expectation 
that soon some Lavoisier will arise to rescue it from 
its depressed condition" (659). He thinks that all 
attempts to assimilate psychology to the other 
natural sciences are "misleading" (ibid.). To me 
this lack of craving for insight into causes is most 
strange. Here is a flagrant mystery, that of the 
union of mind with brain, and we are apparently 
told that we must seek no reasons for it in a deeper 
insight into either factor! — told, in other words, 
that a mere narrative of the life of the spiritual 
being with its "unique unity," developing according 
to its equally unique laws, is the uttermost ideal 
of research — for Professor Ladd's contention is 
hardly distinguishable from this. To me, on the 
other hand, it seems as if "methodologically" the 
crudest cerebralistic theories, or the wildest theo- 
sophic ones about the seven principles of human 
nature, lead in a more healthy direction than this 
contented resignation. And as the theories of in- 
heritance have killed the taxonomic and biographic 

344 



[1894] LADD'S PSYCHOLOGY 

view of natural history by merely superseding it, 
and reduced the older books cf classification to 
mere indexes, so will the descriptive psychologies 
be similarly superseded the moment some genuinely 
causal psycho-physic theory comes upon the stage. 
Not that they will be judged false, but that they 
will then seem insignificant. Alas that my learned 
Yale co-editor will not join with me in saying : 

"Ring out, ring out, our mournful rhymes, 
But ring the fuller minstrel in" ! 



345 



XXV 

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 1 

[1894] 

In the year 1884 Professor Lange of Copenhagen 
and the present writer published, independently of 
each other, the same theory of emotional conscious- 
ness. They affirmed it to be the effect of the organic 
changes, muscular and visceral, of which the so- 
called "expression" of the emotion consists. It is 
thus not a primary feeling, directly aroused by the 
exciting object or thought, but a secondary feeling 
indirectly aroused; the primary effect being the 
organic changes in question, which are immediate 
reflexes following upon the presence of the object. 

This idea has a paradoxical sound when first ap- 
prehended, and it has not awakened on the whole 
the confidence of psychologists. It may interest 
some readers if I give a sketch of a few of the more 
recent comments on it. 

Professor Wundt's criticism may be mentioned 
first. 2 He unqualifiedly condemns it, addressing 
himself exclusively to Lange's version. He accuses 
the latter of being one of those psychologischen 
ScJieinerklarungen which assume that science is 

I 1 Reprinted from Psychological Review, 1894, 1, 516-529. 
Cf. "What is an Emotion?" above, pp. 244-275, and p. 244, 
note, Ed.] 

2 PMlosophische Studien, VI., 349 (1891). 

346 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

satisfied when a psychic fact is once for all referred 
to a physiological ground. 

His own account of the matter is that the im- 
mediate and primary result of "the reaction of 
Apperception 1 on any conscious-content" or object 
is a Gefuhl (364). Gefuhl is an unanalyzable and 
simple process corresponding in the sphere of 
Gemilth to sensation in the sphere of intellection 
(359) . But Gefuhle have the power of altering the 
course of ideas — inhibiting some and attracting 
others, according to their nature ; and these ideas in 
turn produce both secondary Gefuhle and organic 
changes. The organic changes in turn set up addi- 
tional sinnliche Gefuhle which fuse with the preced- 
ing ones and strengthen the volume of feeling 
aroused. This whole complex process is what Wundt 
calls an Affect or Emotion — a state of mind which, 
as he rightly says, "has thus the power of intensify- 
ing itself" (358-363). I shall speak later of what 
may be meant by the primary Gefuhl thus described. 
Wundt in any case would seem to be certain both 

1 In this article, as in the 4th edition of his Psychology, 
Wundt vaguely completes his volte-face concerning "Appercep- 
tion" and dimly describes the latter in associationist terms. 
"Apperception is nothing really separable from the effects which 
it produces in the content of representation. In fact it consists 
of nothing but these concomitants and effects. [A thing that 
"consists" of its concomitants !] ... In each single appercep- 
tive act the entire previous content of the conscious life oper- 
ates as a sort of integral total force" (364, 365), etc. The 
whole account seems indistinguishable from pure Herbartism, 
in which Apperception is only a name for the interaction of the 
old and the new in consciousness, of which interaction feeling 
may be one result. 

347 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1894 ^ 

that it is the essential part of the emotion, and that 
currents from the periphery cannot be its organic 
correlate. I should say, granting its existence, that 
it falls short of the emotion proper, since it involves 
no commotion, and that such currents are its cause. 
But of these points later on. The rest of Wundt's 
criticism is immaterial, dealing exclusively with cer- 
tain rash methodological remarks of Lange's; em- 
phasizing the "parallelism" of the psychical and the 
physical ; and pointing out the vanity of seeking in 
the latter a causal explanation of the former. As if 
Lange ever pretended to do this in any intimate 
sense ! Two of Wundt's remarks, however, are more 
concrete. 

How insufficient, he says, must Lange's explana- 
tion of emotions from vaso-motor effects be, when 
it results in making him put joy and anger together 
in one class ! To which I reply both that Lange has 
laid far too great stress on the vaso-motor factor 
in his explanations, and that he has been materially 
wrong about congestion of the face being the es- 
sential feature in anger, for in the height of that 
passion almost every one grows pale — a fact which 
the expression "white with rage" commemorates. 
Secondly, Wundt says, whence comes it that if a cer- 
tain stimulus be what causes emotional expression 
by its mere reflex effects, another stimulus almost 
identical with the first will fail to do so if its 
mental effects are not the same? (355) . The mental 
motivation is the essential thing in the production 
of the emotion, let the "object" be what it may. 

348 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

This objection, in one form or another, recurs in 
all the published criticisms. "Not the mere object 
as such is what determines the physical effects/' 
writes Mr. D. Irons in a recent article 1 which, if it 
were more popularly written, would be undeniably 
effective, "but the subjective feeling towards the ob- 
ject. . . . An emotional class is not something ob- 
jective; each subject to a great extent classifies in 
this regard for itself, and even here time and cir- 
cumstance make alteration and render stability im- 
possible. . . . // / were not afraid, the object would 
not be an object of terror" (p. 84). And Dr. W. L. 
Worcester, in an article 2 which is both popularly 
written and effective, says: "Neither running nor 
any other of the symptoms of fear which he [W. J.] 
enumerates is the necessary result of seeing a bear. 
A chained or caged bear may excite only feelings of 
curiosity, and a well-armed hunter might experience 
only pleasurable feelings at meeting one loose in the 
woods. It is not, then, the perception of the bear 
that excites the movements of fear. We do not run 
from the bear unless we suppose him capable of 
doing us bodily injury. Why should the expecta- 
tion of being eaten, for instance, set the muscles of 
our legs in motion? 'Common sense' would be likely 
to say that it was because we object to being eaten; 
but according to Professor James the reason we 
dislike to be eaten is because we run away" (287). 

1 Professor James's "Theory of Emotion," Mind, p. 78, 1894. 

2 "Observations on Some Points in James's Psychology. II. 
Emotion," The Zionist, Vol. III., p. 285 (1893). 

349 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1894 J 

A reply to these objections is the easiest thing in 
the world to make if one only remembers the force 
of association in psychology. "Objects" are cer- 
tainly the primitive arousers of instinctive reflex 
movements. But they take their place, as experi- 
ence goes on, as elements in total "situations," 1 the 
other suggestions of which may prompt to move- 
ments of an entirely different sort. As soon as an 
object has become thus familiar and suggestive, its 
emotional consequences, on any theory of emotion, 
must start rather from the total situation which it 
suggests than from its own naked presence. But 
whatever be our reaction on the situation, in the last 
resort it is an instinctive reaction on that one of 
its elements which strikes us for the time being as 
most vitally important. The same bear may truly 
enough excite us to either fight or flight, according 
as he suggests an overpowering "idea" of his killing 
us, or one of our killing him. But in either case the 
question remains : Does the emotional excitement 
which follows the idea follow it immediately, or sec- 
ondarily and as a consequence of the "diffusive 
wave" of impulses aroused? 

Dr. Worcester finds something absurd in the very 
notion of acts constituting emotion by the conscious- 
ness which they arouse. How is it, he says, with vol- 
untary acts? "If I see a shower coming up and run 
for a shelter, the emotion is evidently of the same 
kind, though perhaps less in degree, as in the case of 

1 In my nomenclature it is the total situation which is the 
"object" on which the reaction of the subject is made. 

350 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

the man who runs from the bear. According to Pro- 
fessor James, I am afraid of getting wet because I 
run. But suppose that instead of running I step 
into a shop and buy an umbrella. The emotion is 
still the same. I am afraid of getting wet. Con- 
sequently, so far as I can see, the fear in this case 
consists in buying the umbrella. Fear of hunger, 
in like manner, might consist in laying in a store of 
provisions; fears of poverty in shovelling dirt at 
a dollar a day, and so on indefinitely. Anger, again, 
may be associated with many other actions than 
striking. Shylock's anger at Antonio's insults 
induced him to lend him money. Did the anger 
. . . consist in the act of lending the money?" 
(291) . I think that all the force of such objections 
lies in the slapdash brevity of the language used, of 
which I admit that my own text set a bad example 
when it said "we are frightened because we run." 
Yet let the word "run" but stand for what it was 
meant to stand for, namely, for many other move- 
ments in us, of which invisible visceral ones seem 
by far the most essential ; discriminate also between 
the various grades of emotion which we designate 
by one name, and our theory holds up its head again. 
"Fear" of getting wet is not the same fear as fear of 
a bear. It may limit itself to a prevision of the un- 
pleasantness of a wet skin or of spoiled clothes, and 
this may prompt either to deliberate running or to 
buying an umbrella with a very minimum of prop- 
erly emotional excitement being aroused. What- 
ever the fear may be in such a case, it is not con- 

351 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1894 3 

stituted by the voluntary act. 1 Only the details of 
the concrete case can inform us whether it be, as 
above suggested, a mere ideal vision of unpleasant 
sensations, or whether it go farther and involve also 
feelings of reflex organic change. But in either case 
our theory will cover all the facts. 

Both Dr. Worcester and Mr. Irons are struck by 
this variability in the symptoms of any given emo- 
tion ; and holding the emotion itself to be constant, 
they consider that such inconstant symptoms can- 
not be its cause. Dr. Worcester acutely remarks 
that the actions accompanying all emotions tend to 
become alike in proportion to their intensity. 
People weep from excess of joy; pallor and trem- 
bling accompany extremes of hope as well as of fear, 
etc. But, I answer, do not the subject's feelings also 
then tend to become alike, if considered in them- 
selves apart from all their differing intellectual con- 
texts? My theory maintains that they should do 
so; and such reminiscences of extreme emotion as 
I possess rather seem to confirm than to invalidate 
such a view. 

In Dr. Lehmann's highly praiseworthy book, Die 
Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefiihlslebensf 
much is said of Lange's theory; and in particular 
this same alleged identity of the emotion in the 
midst of such shifting organic symptoms seems to 
strike the critic as a fact irreconcilable with its be- 

1 When the running has actually commenced, it gives rise to 
exhilaration by its effects on breathing and pulse, etc., in this 
case, and not to fear. 

2 Leipzig, 1892. 

352 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

ing true. The emotion ought to be different when the 
symptoms are different, if the latter make the emo- 
tion ; whereas if we lay a primary mental feeling at 
its core its constancy with shifting symptoms is no 
such hard thing to understand (p. 120). Some in- 
constancy in the mental state itself, however, Dr. 
Lehmann admits to follow from the shifting symp- 
toms; but he contrasts the small degree of this in- 
constancy in the case of "motived" emotions where 
we have a recognized mental cause for our mood, 
with its great degree where the emotion is "un- 
motived," as when it is produced by intoxicants 
(alcohol, haschisch, opium) or by cerebral disease, 
and changes to its opposite with every reversal of 
the vaso-motor and other organic states. I must 
say that I cannot regard this argument as fatal to 
Lange's and my theory so long as we remain in such 
real ignorance as to what the subjective variations 
of our emotions actually are. Exacter observation, 
both introspective and symptomatic, might well 
show in "motived" emotions also just the amount 
of inconstancy that the theory demands. 

Mr. Irons actually accuses me of self-contradic- 
tion in admitting that the symptoms of the same 
emotion vary from one man to another, and yet that 
the emotion has them for its cause. How can any 
definite emotion, he asks, exist under such circum- 
stances, and what is there then left to give unity to 
such concepts as anger or fear at all (82)? The 
natural reply is that the bodily variations are within 
limits, and that the symptoms of the angers and of 

353 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1894 l 

the fears of different men still preserve enough func- 
tional resemblance, to say the very least, in the 
midst of their diversity to lead us to call them by 
identical names. Surely there is no definite affec- 
tion of "anger" in an "entitative" sense. 

Mr. Irons finds great difficulty in believing that 
both intellectual and emotional states of mind, both 
the cognition of an object and the emotion which 
it causes, contrasted as they are, can be due to such 
similar neural processes, viz., currents from the 
periphery, as my theory assumes. "How," he asks, 
"can one perceptive process of itself suffuse with 
emotional warmth the cold intellectuality of 
another? ... If perceptions can have this warmth, 
why is it the exclusive property of perception of 
organic disturbance ( 85 ) ?" I reply in the first 
place that it is not such exclusive property, for all 
the higher senses have warmth when "aesthetic" 
objects excite them. And I reply in the second place 
that even if secondarily aroused visceral thrills were 
the only objects that had warmth, I should see no 
difficulty in accepting the fact. This writer further 
lays great stress on the vital difference between the 
receptive and the reactive states of the mind, and 
considers that the theory under discussion takes 
away all ground for the distinction. His account 
of the inner contrast in question is excellent. He 
gives the name of "feeling-attitude" to the whole 
class of reactions of the self, of which the experi- 
ences which we call emotions are one species. He 
sharply distinguishes feeling-attitude from mere 

354 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

pleasure and pain — a distinction in which I fully 
agree. The line of direction in feeling-attitude is 
from the self outward, he says, while that of mere 
pleasure and pain (and of perception and ideation) 
is from the object to the self. It is impossible to 
feel pleasure or pain toivards an object; and common 
language makes a sharp distinction between being 
pained and having bad feelings towards somebody 
in consequence. These attitudes of feeling are al- 
most indefinitely numerous; some of them must 
always intervene between cognition and action, and 
when in them we feel our whole Being moved (93- 
96). Of course one must admit that any account 
of the physiology of emotion that should be incon- 
sistent with the possibility of this strong contrast 
within consciousness would thereby stand con- 
demned. But on what ground have we the right 
to affirm that visceral and muscular sensibility can- 
not give the direction from the self outwards, if 
the higher senses (taken broadly, with their idea- 
tional sequelse) give the direction from the object to 
the self? We do, it is true, but follow a natural 
analogy when we say (as Fouillee keeps saying in 
his works on Idees-forces, and as Ladd would seem 
to imply in his recent Psychology) that the former 
direction in consciousness ought to be mediated by 
outgoing nerve-currents, and the latter by currents 
passing in. But is not this analogy a mere super- 
ficial fancy, which reflection shows to have no basis 
in any existing knowledge of what such currents 
can or cannot bring to pass? We surely know too 

355 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1894 1 

little of the psycho-physic relation to warrant us in 
insisting that the similarity of direction of two 
physical currents makes it impossible that they 
should bring a certain inner contrast about. 

Both Dr. Worcester and Mr. Irons insist on the 
fact that consciousness of bodily disturbance, taken 
by itself, and apart from its combination with the 
consciousness of an exciting object, is not emotional 
at all. "Laughing and sobbing, for instance," writes 
the former, "are spasmodic movements of the 
muscles of respiration, not strikingly different from 
hiccoughing; and there seems no good reason why 
the consciousness of the former two should usually 
be felt as strong emotional excitement while the lat- 
ter is not. . . . Shivering from cold, for instance, is 
the same sort of a movement as may occur in vio- 
lent fright but it does not make us feel frightened. 
The laughter excited in children and sensitive per- 
sons by tickling of the skin is not necessarily accom- 
panied by any mirthful feelings. The act of vomit- 
ing may be the accompaniment of the most extreme 
disgust, or it may occur without a trace of such 
emotion" (289). The facts must be admitted; but 
in none of these cases where an organic change gives 
rise to a mere local bodily perception is the repro- 
duction of an emotional diffusive wave complete. 
Visceral factors, hard to localize, are left out; and 
these seem to be the most essential ones of all. I 
have said that where they also from any inward 
cause are added, we have the emotion ; and that then 
the subject is seized with objectless or pathological 

356 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

dread, grief, or rage, as the case may be. Mr. Irons 
refuses to accept this interpretation. The bodily 
symptoms do not here, he says, when felt, constitute 
the emotion. In the case of fear they constitute 
rather the object of which we are afraid. We fear 
them, on account of their unknown or indefinite evil 
consequences. In the case of morbid rage, he sug- 
gests, the movements are probably not the expres- 
sion of a genuine inner rage, but only frantic 
attempts to relieve some inward pain, which out- 
wardly look like rage to the observer ( 80 ) . These 
interpretations are ingenious, and may be left to 
the reader's judgment. I confess that they fail to 
convert me from my own hypothesis. 1 

Messrs. Irons and Wundt (and possibly Baldwin 
and Sully, neither of whom accept the theory in dis- 

1 Mr. Irons elsewhere says that "an object on being presented 
suddenly may cause intense fear. On being recognized as 
familiar the terror may vanish instantly, and while the mental 
mood has changed, for a measurable time at least, all the bodily 
effects of the former state are present" (86). Their dying 
phase certainly is present for a while; but has the emotion 
then "vanished instantly"? I should rather say that there is 
then a very mixed emotional state, in which something of the 
departing terror still blends with the incoming joy of relief. 
The case of waking from nightmare is for us civilizees prob- 
ably the most frequent experience in point. On such occasions 
the horror with me is largely composed of an intensely strong 
but indescribable feeling in my breast and in all my muscles, 
especially those of the legs, which feel as if they were boiled 
into shreds or otherwise inwardly decomposed. This feeling 
fades out slowly and until it is gone the horror abides, in spite 
of the fact that I am already enjoying the incomplete relief 
which comes of knowing that the bad experience is a dream, 
and that the horror is on the wane. It were much to be wished 
that many persons should make observations of this sort, for 
individual idiosyncrasy may be great. 

357 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS U894] 

pute, but to whose works I have not access where I 
write, so that I cannot verify my impression) think 
that the theory carries with it implications of an 
objectionable sort philosophically. Irons, for ex- 
ample, says that it belongs to a psychology in which 
feeling can have no place, because it ignores the self 
and its unity, etc. ( 92) . In my own mind the theory 
has no philosophic implications whatever of a gen- 
eral sort. It assumes (what probably every one 
assumes) that there must be a process of some sort 
in the nerve-centres for emotion, and it simply de- 
fines that process to consist of afferent currents. It 
does this on no general theoretic grounds, but be- 
cause of the introspective appearances exclusively. 
The objective qualities with which perception ac- 
quaints us are considered by psychologists to be re- 
sults of sensation. When these qualities affect us 
with pleasure or displeasure, we say that the sensa- 
tions have a "tone of feeling." Whether this tone 
be due to a mere form of the process in the nerve 
of sense, as some authors {e.g., Mr. Marshall) think, 
or to additional specific nerves, as others {e.g., Dr. 
Nichols) opine, is immaterial. The pleasantness or 
unpleasantness, once there, seems immediately to 
inhere in the sensible quality itself. They are 
beaten up together in our consciousness. But in 
addition to this pleasantness or painfulness of the 
content, which in any case seems due to afferent 
currents, we may also feel a general seizure of ex- 
citement, which Wundt, Lehmann, and other Ger- 
man writers call an Affect, and which is what I have 

358 



£1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

all along meant by an emotion. Xow whenever I my- 
self have sought to discover the mind-stuff of which 
such seizures consist, it has always seemed to me to 
be additional sensations often hard to describe, but 
usually easy to identify, and localized in divers por- 
tions of my organism, In addition to these sensa- 
tions I can discern nothing but the "objective con- 
tent" (taking this broadly so as to include judgments 
as well as elements judged), together with whatever 
agreeableness or disagreeableness the content may 
come tinged by. 1 Such organic sensations being also 

1 The disagreeableness, etc., is a very mild affection, not dras- 
tic or grasping in se in the case of any objective content except 
localized bodily pain, properly so called. Here the feeling seems 
in itself overpowering in intensity apart from all secondary 
emotional excitement. But I think that even here a distinction 
needs to be made between the primary consciousness of the 
pain's intrinsic quality, and the consciousness of its degree of 
intolerabiltty, which is a secondary affair, seeming connected 
with reflex organic irradiations. I recently, while traversing a 
little surgical experience, had occasion to verify once more the 
fact that it is not the mere ~bigness of a pain that makes it most 
unbearable. If a pain is honest and definite and well localized 
it may be very heavy and strong without taxing the extreme of 
our endurance. But there are pains which we feel to be faint 
and small in their intrinsic amount, but which have something 
so poisonous and non-natural about them that consent to their 
continuance is impossible. Our whole being refuses to suffer 
them. These pains produce involuntary shrinkings, writhings, 
sickness, faintness, and dread. For such emotion superadded 
to the pain itself there is no distinctive name in English. Pro- 
fessor Miinsterberg has distinguished between Schmerz as an 
original "content" of consciousness and Unlust as due to flexor 
reactions provoked thereby; and before his Essay appeared, I 
remember hearing Dr. D. S. Miller and Dr. Xichols maintain in 
conversation that painfulness may be always a matter of "intol- 
erability," due to the reflex irradiations which the painful ob- 
ject may arouse. Thus might even the mildest Gemutsvorgdnge 
be brought under the terms of my theory. 

359 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS l^m 

presumably due to incoming currents, the result is 
that the whole of my consciousness (whatever its 
inner contrasts be) seems to me to be outwardly 
mediated by these. This is the length and breadth 
of my "theory" — which, as I apprehend it, is a very 
unpretending thing. 

It may be, after all, that the difference between 
the theory and the views of its critics is insignifi- 
cant. Wundt admits tertiary feelings, due to or- 
ganic disturbance, which must fuse with the pri- 
mary and secondary feelings before we can have an 
"Affect" ; Lehmann writes : "Constrained bv the 
facts, we are obliged to concede to the organic sensa- 
tions and tones of feeling connected with them an 
essential participation in emotion (wesentliche Be- 
deutung fur die Affecte)" (p. 115) ; and Professor 
Ladd also admits that the "rank" quality of the 
emotions comes from the organic repercussions 
which they involve. So far, then, we are all agreed ; 
and it may be admitted, in Dr. Worcester's words, 
that the theory under attack "contains an important 
truth," and even that its authors have "rendered a 
real service to psychology" (p. 295). Why, then, is 
there such strong opposition? When the critics say 
that the theory still contradicts their consciousness 
(Worcester, p. 288), do they mean that introspec- 
tion acquaints them with a part of the emotional 
excitement which it is psycho-physically impossible 
that incoming currents should cause? Or, do they 
merely mean that the part which introspection can 
localize in the body is so small that when abstracted 

360 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

a large mass of unrealizable emotion remains? Al- 
though Mr. Irons professes the former of these two 
meanings, the only prudent one to stand by is surely 
the latter ; and here, of course, every man will hold 
by his own consciousness. I for one shall never 
deny that individuals may greatly differ in their 
ability to localize the various elements of their or- 
ganic excitement when under emotion. I am even 
willing to admit that the primary Gefiihlston may 
vary enormously in distinctness in different men. 
But speaking for myself, I am compelled to say 
that the only feelings which I cannot more or less 
well localize in my body are very mild and, so to 
speak, platonic affairs. I allow them hypothetically 
to exist, however, in the form of the "subtler" emo- 
tions, and in the mere intrinsic agreeableness and 
disagreeableness of particular sensations, images, 
and thought-processes, where no obvious organic ex- 
citement is aroused. 1 

This being the case, it seems almost as if the ques- 
tion had become a verbal one. For which sort of 
feeling is the word "emotion" the more proper name 
— for the organic feeling which gives the rank char- 
acter of commotion to the excitement, or for that 

'Mr. Irons contends that in admitting "subtler" forms of emo- 
tion, I throw away my whole case (88, 89) ; and Dr. Lehmann 
enters into an elaborate argument to prove (as he alleges, 
against Lange and me) that primary feeling, as a possible ac- 
companiment of any sensation whatever, must be admitted to 
exist (§§ 157-164). Such objections are a complete ignoratio 
elenchi, addressed to some imaginary theory with which my 
own, as I myself understand it, has nothing whatever to do, 
all that I have ever maintained being the dependence on in- 
coming currents of the emotional seizure or Affect. 

361 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1894] 

more primary pleasure or displeasure in the object, 
or in the thought of it, to which commotion and ex- 
citement do not belong? I myself took for granted 
without discussion that the word "emotion" meant 
the rank feeling of excitement, and that the special 
emotions were names of special feelings of excite- 
ment, and not of mild feelings that might remain 
when the excitement was removed. It appears, how- 
ever, that in this assumption I reckoned without 
certain of my hosts. 

Dr. Worcester's quarrel with me at the end of his 
article becomes almost exclusively verbal. All 
pleasure and pain, he says, whether primary and of 
the higher senses and intellectual products, or sec- 
ondary and organic, should be called "emotion" 
(296). 1 Pleasure or pain revived in idea, as dis- 
tinguished from vivid sensuous pleasure and pain, 
he suggests to be what is meant by emotion "in the 
sense in which the word is commonly used" (297) ; 
and he gives an array of cases in point : 

"Suppose that I have taken a nauseous dose and 
made a wry face over it. No one, I presume, would 
question that the disagreeableness lay in the unpleasant 
taste, and not in the distortion of the countenance. 

1 "The essence of emotion is pleasure and pain," he adds. This 
is a hackneyed psychological doctrine, but on any theory of the 
seat of emotion it seems to me one of the most artificial and 
scholastic of the untruths that disfigure our science. One 
might as well say that the essence of prismatic color is pleas- 
ure and pain. There are infinite shades and tones in the vari- 
ous emotional excitements, which are as distinct as sensations 
of color are, and of which one is quite at a loss to predicate 
either pleasant or painful quality. 

362 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

Now suppose I have to repeat the dose, and my face 
takes on a similar expression, at the anticipation, to 
that which it wore when I took it originally. How 
does this come about ? If I can trust my own conscious- 
ness, it is because the vivid reproduction, in memory, 
of the unpleasant taste is itself unpleasant. ... If 
this be the fact, what can be more natural than that it 
should excite the same sort of associated movements 
that were excited by the original sensation? I cannot 
make it seem any more credible that my repugnance to 
a repetition of the dose is due to my involuntary move- 
ments than my discomfort in taking it originally was 
due to the similar movements that occurred then. . . . 
I hardly think that any one who will consult his own 
consciousness will say that the reason he likes the taste 
of an orange is that it makes him laugh or smile to 
get it. He likes it because it tastes good, and is sorry 
to lose it for the same reason." (I~bid.) 

Now, accepting Dr. Worcester's description of the 
facts, I remark immediately that the nauseousness 
and pleasantness are due to incoming nerve-currents 
— at any rate in the cases which he selects — and the 
feeling of the involuntary movements as well; so 
whatever name we give to the phenomena, so far 
they fall comfortably under the terms of my theory. 
The only question left over is what may be covered 
by the words "repugnance" and "liking," which I 
have italicized, but which Dr. Worcester does not 
emphasize, as^he describes his instances. Are these 
a third sort of affection, not due to afferent currents, 
and interpolated between the gustatory feelings and 
reactions which are so due? Or are they a name for 
what, when carefully considered, resolves itself into 

363 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £1894] 

more delicate reactions still? I privately incline to 
the latter view, but the whole animus of my critic's 
article obliges me to attribute to him the opinion, 
not only that the like and dislike must be a third 
sort of affection not grounded on incoming currents, 
but that they form the distinctive elements of the 
"emotional" state of mind. 

The whole discussion sharpens itself here to a 
point. We can leave the lexicographers to decide 
which elements the word "emotional" belongs to; 
for our concern is with the facts, and the question 
of fact is now very plain. Must we (under any 
name) admit as an important element in the emo- 
tional state of mind something which is distinct 
both from the intrinsic feeling-tone of the object 
and from that of the reactions aroused — an element 
of which the "liking" and "repugnance" mentioned 
above would be types, but for which other names 
may in other cases be found? The belief that some 
such element does exist, and exist in vital amount, 
is undoubtedly present in the minds of all the re- 
jectors of the theory in dispute. Dr. Worcester 
rightly regrets the deadlock when one man's intro- 
spection thus contradicts another's (288), and de- 
mands a more objective sort of umpire. Can such a 
one be found? I shall try to show now that it pos- 
sibly has been found ; and that Dr. Sollier's recent 
observations on complete anesthetics show that in 
some persons at least the supposed third kind of 
mental element may exist, if it exists at all, in al- 
together inappreciable amount. 

364 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

In my original article I had invoked cases of 
generalized anaesthesia, and admitted that if a 
patient could be found who, in spite of being anses- 
thetic inside and out, could still suffer emotion, my 
case would be upset. 1 I had quoted such cases as I 
was aware of at the time of writing, admitting that 
so far as appearances went they made against the 
theory ; but I had tried to save the latter by distin- 
guishing between the objective reaction which the 
patient makes and the subjective feeling which it 
gives him. Since then a number of cases of general- 
ized amesthesia have been published, but unfortu- 
nately the patients have not been interrogated from 
the proper point of view. The famous "theory" has 
been unknown to the reporting doctors. Two such 
cases, however, described by Dr. Berkley of Balti- 
more, 2 are cited by Dr. Worcester "for what they 
are worth" in its refutation (294). The first pa- 
tient was an Englishwoman, with complete loss of 
the senses of pain, heat and cold, pressure and 
equilibrium, of smell, taste, and sight. The senses 
of touch and of position were not completely gone, 
but greatly impaired, and she could hear a little. 
As for visceral sensations, she had had no hunger 
or thirst for two years, but she was warned by feel- 
ing of the evacuative needs. She laughs at a joke, 
shows definitely grief, shame, surprise, fear, and re- 
pulsion. Dr. Berkley writes to Dr. Worcester as fol- 
lows : "My own impression derived from observation 
of the patient, is that all mental emotional sensi- 

[ J See above, p. 271. Ed.] 2 Brain, Part IV, 1891. 

365 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 1894 3 

bilities are present, and only a little less vivid than 
in the unanaesthetic state; and that emotions are 
approximately natural and not at all coldly dis- 
passionate." 

The second case was that of a Kussian woman 
with complete loss of cutaneous, and almost com- 
plete loss of muscular, sensibility. Sight, smell, 
hearing preserved, and nothing said of visceral sen- 
sation (in Dr. Worcester's citation). She showed 
anger and amusement, and not the slightest apathy. 

This last case is obviously too incompletely re- 
ported to serve ; and in the preceding one it will be 
noticed that certain degrees of visceral and of mus- 
cular sensibility remained. As these seem the im- 
portant sorts emotionally, she may well have felt 
emotion. Dr. Berkley, however, writes of her 
"apathy" ; and it will be noticed that he thinks her 
emotions "less vivid than in the unanaesthetic state." 

In Dr. Sollier's patient the anaesthesia was far 
more complete, and the patient was examined for 
the express purpose of testing the dependence of 
emotion on organic sensibility. Dr. Sollier, more- 
over, experimented on two other subjects in whom 
the anaesthesia was artificially induced by hypnotic 
suggestion. The spontaneous case was a man aged 
forty-four; the hypnotic cases were females of 
hysteric constitution. 1 In the man the anaesthetic 
condition extended so far that at present every sur- 
face, cutaneous and mucous, seems absolutely insen- 

1 The paper, entitled "Recherches sur les Rapports de la Sen- 
sibilite et de l'Emotion," will be found in the Revue Philoso- 
phique for March of this year, Vol. XXXVII., p. 241. 

366 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

sible. The muscular sense is wholly abolished ; the 
feelings of hunger and satiety do not exist; the 
needs of defecation and micturition are unf elt ; taste 
and smell are gone; sight much enfeebled; hearing 
alone is about normal. The cutaneous and tendi- 
nous reflexes are lacking. The physiognomy has no 
expression; speech is difficult; the entire muscular 
apparatus is half paralyzed, so that locomotion is al- 
most impossible. 

" 'I know/ this patient says, 'that I have a heart, but 
I do not feel it beat, except sometimes very faintly.' 
When an event happens which ought to affect it [the 
heart, as I understand the text], he fails equally to feel 
it. He does not feel himself breathe, or know whether 
he makes a strong or a weak inspiration. <I do not 
feel myself alive/ he says. Early in his illness he sev- 
eral times thought himself dead. He does not know 
whether he is asleep or awake. ... He often has no 
thoughts. When he does think of anything it is of 
his home or of the war of 1870, in which he took part. 
The people whom he sees come and go about him are 
absolutely indifferent to him. He does not notice what 
they do. 'They do not appear/ he says, 'like natural 
men to me, but more like mechanisms.' Similar per- 
turbations of perception occur also in hearing. 'I do 
not hear in the old way; it is as if it sounded in my 
ear, but did not enter into my head. It does not stay 
there long.' His aprosexia is complete, and he is in- 
capable of interest in anything whatever. Nothing 
gives him pleasure. 'I am insensible to everything; 
nothing interests me. I love nobody ; neither do I dis- 
like anybody.' He does not even know whether it would 
give him pleasure to get well, and when I tell him that 
his cure is possible it awakens no reaction — not even 

'" 367 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1894 3 

one of surprise or doubt. The only thing that seems 
to move him a little is the visit of his wife. When she 
appears in the room 'it gives me a stroke in the 
stomach/ he says; 'but as soon as she is there I wish 
her away again. 7 He often has a fear that his daugh- 
ter may be dead. 'If she should die I believe I should 
not survive her, although if I never were to see her 
again it would make no difference to me.' His visual 
images are non-existent, and he has no representation 
of his wife when she is gone. The weakness of the sen- 
sations remaining to him gives him a sense of uncer- 
tainty about all things : 'I am never sure of anything.' 
Nothing surprises or astonishes him. His state of 
apathy, of indifference, of extreme emotionlessness, has 
developed slowly pari passu with the anaesthesia. His 
case realizes, therefore, as completely as possible the 
experiment desiderated by W. James." 

In the hypnotic experiments, Dr. Sollier provoked 
in his subjects sometimes visceral and sometimes 
peripheral anaesthesia, and sometimes both at once. 
He registered the organic reactions (by pneumo- 
graph, etc.) as far as possible, and compared them 
with those produced in the same subject when an 
emotion-exciting idea was suggested, first in the 
anaesthetic and then in the normal state. Finally, 
he questioned the subject on the impressions she 
had received. For the detailed results the reader 
must consult the original paper. I will only men- 
tion those which seem most important, as follows : 

(1) Complete peripheral anaesthesia abolishes 
completely the power of movement. At the same 
time the limbs grow cold and sometimes blue (247) . 

(2) When visceral anaesthesia is added, the 

368 



[1894] PHYSICAL BASIS OF EMOTION 

patient says she feels as if she no longer were alive 
{ibid.). 

(3) When totally anaesthetic she feels no normal 
emotion whatever at the suggestion of hallucina- 
tions and delusions which have the power of moving 
her strongly when the sensibility is restored. When 
the anaesthesia is less complete she may say that she 
feels not the usual emotion, but a certain stroke in 
the head or stomach at the reception of the moving 
idea (250,254). 

(4) When the anaesthesia is solely peripheral, the 
emotion takes place with almost normal strength. 

(5) When it is solely visceral, the emotion is 
abolished almost as much as when it is total, so that 
the emotion depends almost exclusively on visceral 
sensations (258). 

(6) There is sometimes a very slight motor re- 
action shown by the pneumograph in visceral anaes- 
thesia when an exciting idea is suggested (Figs. 2, 
7 Ms), but M. Sollier thinks (for reasons of a highly 
speculative kind) that in complete inemotivity the 
visceral reactions themselves do not take place 
(265). 

The reader sees that M. Sollier's experimental re- 
sults go on the whole farther than "my theory" ever 
required. With the visceral sensibility not only the 
"coarser" but even the "subtler" forms of emotion 
depart. Some people must then be admitted to 
exist in whom the amount of supposed feeling that 
is not due to incoming currents is a negligible quan- 
tity. Of course we must bear in mind the fallibility 

369 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1894 ^ 

of experiments made by the method of "suggestion." 
We must moreover remember that the male patient's 
inemotivity may have been a co-ordinate result with 
the anaesthesia, of his neural lesions, and not the 
anaesthesia's mere effect. But nevertheless, if many 
cases like those of M. Sollier should be found by 
other observers, I think that Professor Lange's 
theory and mine ought no longer to be treated as a 
heresy, but might become the orthodox belief. That 
part, if there be any, of emotional feeling which is 
not of afferent origin should be admitted to be in- 
significant, and the name "emotion" should be suf- 
fered to connote organic excitement as the distinc- 
tive feature of the state. 



370 



XXVI 

THE KNOWING OF THINGS 
TOGETHEB x 

[1895] 



The nature of the synthetic unity of consciousness 
is one of those great underlying problems that di- 
vide the psychological schools. We know, say, a 
dozen things singly through a dozen different men- 
tal states. But on another occasion we may know 
the same dozen things together through a single 
mental state. The problem is as to the relation of 
the previous many states to the later one state. 

1 Read as the President's Address before the American Psy- 
chological Association at Princeton, December, 1894, and re- 
printed with some unimportant omissions, a few slight revisions, 
and the addition of some explanatory notes. [Reprinted from 
the Psychological Review, 1895, 2, 105-124. Pages 374-379, deal- 
ing with the distinction between representative and immediate 
knowledge, were reprinted in The Meaning of Truth (1909), 
pp. 43-50, under the title of "The Tigers in India." For a later 
elaboration of this topic, cf. also Essays in Radical Empiricism 
(1912), pp. 1-91. The remainder of the present article, dealing 
with the problem of the unity of consciousness, should be read 
in the light of the earlier view maintained in the Principles 
(1890), Vol. I., pp. 177, 278, and passim, and the later view 
adopted in The Pluralistic Universe (1909), pp. 190, 205-212. 
It was on this issue of "the compounding of consciousness" that 
James finally broke with "logic" and adopted Bergsonism 
(iUd., 212, 214 j. Ed.] 

371 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1895 i 

In physical nature, it is universally agreed, a multi- 
tude of facts always remain the multitude they were 
and appear as one fact only when a mind comes 
upon the scene and so views them, as when H-O-H 
appear as "water" to a human spectator. But when, 
instead of extramental "things," the mind com- 
bines its own "contents" into a unity, what happens 
is much less plain. 

The matters of fact that give the trouble are 
among our most familiar experiences. We know a 
lot of friends and can think of each one singly. 
But we can also think of them together, as compos- 
ing a "party" at our house. We can see single stars 
appearing in succession between the clouds on a 
stormy night, but we can also see whole constella- 
tions of those stars at once when the wind has 
blown the clouds away. In a glass of lemonade we 
can taste both the lemon and the sugar at once. In 
a major chord our ear can single out the c, e, g, and 
c', if it has once become acquainted with these notes 
apart. And so on through the whole field of our ex- 
perience, whether conceptual or sensible. Neither 
common sense nor commonplace psychology finds 
anything special to explain in these facts. Common 
sense simply says the mind "brings the things to- 
gether," and common psychology says the "ideas" of 
the various things "combine," and at most will ad- 
mit that the occasions on which ideas combine may 
be made the subject of inquiry. But to formulate 
the phenomenon of knowing things together thus as 
a combining of ideas, is already to foist in a theory 

372 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

about the phenomenon simply. Not so should a 
question be approached. The phenomenon offers 
itself, in the first instance, as that of knowing things 
together; and it is in those terms that its solution 
must, in the first instance at least, be sought. 

"Things," then; to "know" things; and to know 
the "same" things "together" which elsewhere we 
knew singly — here, indeed, are terms concerning 
each of which we must put the question, "What do 
we mean by it when we use it?" — that question that 
Shadworth Hodgson lays so much stress on, and 
that is so well taught to students, as the beginning 
of all sound method, by our colleague Fullerton. 
And in exactly ascertaining what we do mean by 
such terms there might lie a lifetime of occupation. 

For we do mean something; and we mean some- 
thing true. Our terms, whatever confusion they 
may connote, denote at least a fundamental fact 
of our experience, whose existence no one here 
present will deny. 

II 

What, then, do we mean by "things"? To this 
question I can only make the answer of the idealistic 
philosophy. 1 For the philosophy that began with 
Berkeley, and has led up in our tongue to Shad- 
worth Hodgson, things have no other nature than 
thoughts have, and we know of no things that are 

I 1 This view James later modifies. The "radical empiricism" 
which he later formulates "has, in fact, more affinities with 
natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill" 
(Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912, p. 76). Ed.] 

373 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1895 ] 

not given to somebody's experience. When I see 
the thing white paper before my eyes, the nature of 
the thing and the nature of my sensations are one. 
Even if with science we supposed a molecular archi- 
tecture beneath the smooth whiteness of the paper, 
that architecture itself could only be denned as the 
stuff of a farther possible experience, a vision, say, 
of certain vibrating particles with which our ac- 
quaintance with the paper would terminate if 
it were prolonged by magnifying artifices not yet 
known. A thing may be my phenomenon or some 
one else's ; it may be frequently or infrequently ex- 
perienced; it may be shared by all of us; one of our 
copies of it may be regarded as the original, and the 
other copies as representatives of that original; it 
may appear very differently at different times ; but 
whatever it be, the stuff of which it is made is 
thought-stuff, and whenever we speak of a thing 
that is out of our own mind, we either mean noth- 
ing ; or we mean a thing that was or will be in our 
own mind on another occasion ; or, finally, we mean 
a thing in the mind of some other possible receiver 
of experiences like ours. 

Such being "things," what do we mean by saying 
that we "know" them? 

There are two ways of knowing things, knowing 
them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them 
conceptually or representatively. Although such 
things as the white paper before our eyes can be 
known intuitively, most of the things we know, the 
tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic 

374 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

system of philosophy, are known only representa- 
tively or symbolically. 

Suppose, to fix our ideas, that we take first a case 
of conceptual knowledge; and let it be our knowl- 
edge of the tigers in India, as we sit here. Exactly 
what do we mean by saying that we here know the 
tigers? What is the precise fact that the cogni- 
tion so confidently claimed is known-as, to use 
Shadworth Hodgson's inelegant but valuable form 
of words? 

Most men would answer that what we mean by 
knowing the tigers is having them, however absent in 
body, become in some way present to our thought; 
or that our knowledge of them is known as presence 
of our thought to them. A great mystery is usually 
made of this peculiar presence in absence ; and the 
scholastic philosophy, which is only common sense 
grown pedantic, would explain it as a peculiar kind 
of existence, called intentional inexistence, of the 
tigers in our mind. At the very least, people would 
say that what we mean by knowing the tigers is 
mentally pointing towards them as we sit here. 

But now what do we mean by pointing, in such a 
case as this? What is the pointing known-as, 
here ? 

To this question I shall have to give a very 
prosaic answer — one that traverses the preposses- 
sions not only of common sense and scholasticism, 
but also those of nearly all the epistemological 
writers whom I have ever read. The answer, made 
brief, is this : The pointing of our thought to the 

375 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS C^W 

tigers is known simply and solely as a procession 
of mental associates and motor consequences that 
follow on the thought, and that would lead harmoni- 
ously, if followed out, into some ideal or real con- 
text, or even into the immediate presence, of the 
tigers. It is known as our rejection of a jaguar, 
if that beast were shown us as a tiger ; as our assent 
to a genuine tiger if so shown. It is known as our 
ability to utter all sorts of propositions which don't 
contradict other propositions that are true of the 
real tigers. It is even known, if we take the tigers 
very seriously, as actions of ours which may termi- 
nate in directly intuited tigers, as they would if we 
took a voyage to India for the purpose of tiger- 
hunting and brought back a lot of skins of the 
striped rascals which we had laid low. In all this 
there is no self -transcendency in our mental images 
taken by themselves. They are one physical fact; 
the tigers are another; and their pointing to the 
tigers is a perfectly commonplace physical rela- 
tion, if you once grant a connecting world to be 
there. In short, the ideas and the tigers are in 
themselves as loose and separate, to use Hume's 
language, as any two things can be; and pointing 
means here an operation as external and adventi- 
tious as any that nature yields. 1 

J A stone in one field may "fit," we say, a hole in another 
field. But the relation of "fitting," so long as no one carries 
the stone to the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the 
fact that such an act may happen. Similarly with the know 
ing of the tigers here and now. It is only an anticipatory name 
for a further associative and terminative process that may 
occur. 

376 



[1893] KNOWING OF THIXGS TOGETHER 

I hope you may agree with me now that in rep- 
resentative knowledge there is no special inner mys- 
tery, bnt only an outer chain of physical or mental 
intermediaries connecting thought and thing. To 
know an object is here to lead to it through a con- 
text which the world supplies. All this was most 
instructively set forth by our colleague Miller, of 
Bryn Mawr, at our meeting in Xew York last 
Christmas, and for re-confirming my sometime 
wavering opinion, I owe him this acknowledg- 
ment. 1 

Let us next pass on to the case of immediate or 
intuitive acquaintance with an object, and let the ob- 
ject be the white paper before our eyes. The thought- 
stuff and the thing-stuff are here indistinguish- 
ably the same in nature, as we saw a moment since, 
and there is no context of intermediaries or associ- 
ates to stand between and separate the thought and 
thing. There is no "presence in absence" here, and 
no "pointing," but rather an all-round embracing of 
the paper by the thought; and it is clear that the 
knowing cannot now be explained exactly as it was 
when the tigers were its object. Dotted all through 
our experience are states of immediate acquaint- 
ance just like this. Somewhere our belief always 
does rest on ultimate data like the whiteness, 
smoothness, or squareness of this paper. Whether 
such qualities be truly ultimate aspects of being or 
only provisional suppositions of ours, held-to till 

1 See also Dr. Miller's article on "Truth and Error," in the 
Philosophical Review, July, 1S93. 

377 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1895 ] 

we get better informed, is quite immaterial for our 
present inquiry. So long as it is believed in, we see 
our object face to face. What now do we mean by 
"knowing" such a sort of object as this? For this 
is also the way in which we should know the tiger 
if our conceptual idea of him were to terminate 
by having led us to his lair. 

This address must not become too long, so I must 
give my answer in the fewest words. And let me 
first say this: So far as the white paper or other 
ultimate datum of our experience is considered to 
enter also into some one else's experience, and we, 
in knowing it, are held to know it there as well as 
here; so far again as it is considered to be a mere 
mask for hidden molecules that other now impos- 
sible experiences of our own might some day lay 
bare to view; so far it is a case of tigers in India 
again — the things known being absent experiences, 
the knowing can only consist in passing smoothly 
towards them through the intermediary context that 
the world supplies. But if our own private vision 
of the paper be considered in abstraction from every 
other event, as if it constituted by itself the uni- 
verse (and it might perfectly well do so, for aught 
we can understand to the contrary), then the paper 
seen and the seeing of it are only two names for 
one indivisible fact which, properly named, is the 
datum, tine phenomenon, or the experience. The 
paper is in the mind and the mind is around the 
paper, because paper and mind are only two names 
that are given later to the one experience, when, 

378 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

taken in a larger world of which it forms a part, 
its connections are traced in different directions. 1 
To know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for 
mental content and object to be identical. This 
is a very different definition from that which we 
gave of representative knowledge ; bnt neither defini- 
tion involves those mysterious notions of self -tran- 
scendency and presence in absence which are such 
essential parts of the ideas of knowledge, both of 
common men and of philosophers. Is there no ex- 
perience that can justify these notions, and show 
us somewhere their original? 

*What is meant by this is that "the experience" can be re- 
ferred to either of two great associative systems, that of the 
experiencer's mental history, or that of the experienced facts 
of the world. Of both of these systems it forms part, and may 
be regarded, indeed, as one of their points of intersection. One 



might let a vertical line stand for the mental history ; but the 
same object, O, appears also in the mental history of different 
persons, represented by the other vertical lines. It thus ceases 
to be the private property of one experience, and becomes, so 
to speak, a shared or public thing. We can track its outer 
history in this way, and represent it by the horizontal line. [It 
is also known representatively at other points of the vertical 
lines, or intuitively there again, so that the line of its outer 
history would have to be looped and wandering, but I make it 
straight for simplicity's sake.] In any case, however, it is the 
same stuff that figures in all the sets of lines. 



379 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1895 ] 

I think the mystery of presence in absence (though 
we fail to find it between one experience and another 
remote experience to which it points, or between the 
"content" and "object" of any one experience falsely 
rent asunder by the application to it of these two 
separate names) may yet be found, and found be- 
tween the parts of a single experience. Let us 
look for it, accordingly, in its simplest possible 
form. What is the smallest experience in which 
the mystery remains? If we seek, we find that there 
is no datum so small as not to show the mystery. 
The smallest effective pulse of consciousness, what- 
ever else it may be consciousness of, is also con- 
sciousness of passing time. The tiniest feeling that 
we can possibly have involves for future reflection 
two sub-feelings, one earlier and the other later, and 
a sense of their continuous procession. All this has 
been admirably set forth by Mr. Shadworth Hodg- 
son, 1 who shows that there is literally no such datum 
as that of the present moment, and no such content, 
and no such object, except as an unreal postulate 
of abstract thought. The passing moment is the 
only thing that ever concretely was or is or shall 
be ; and in the phenomenon of elementary memory, 
whose function is to apprehend it, earlier and later 
are present to each other in an experience that feels 
either only on condition of feeling both together. 

We have the same knowing together in the mat- 
ter that fills the time. The rush of our thought for- 
ward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiar- 

1 Philosophy of Reflection, Vol. L, p. 248 ff . 

380 



[1S95] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHEK 

ity of its life. We realize this life as something 
always off its balance, something in transition, 
something that shoots out of a darkness through a 
dawn into a brightness that we know to be the dawn 
fulfilled. In the very midst of the alteration our 
experience comes as one continuous fact. "Yes," 
we say at the moment of full brightness, this is 
what I meant. No, we feel at the moment of the 
dawning, this is not yet the meaning, there is more 
to come. In every crescendo of sensation, in every 
effort to recall, in every progress towards the satis- 
faction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and 
fulness that have reference to each other and are one 
flesh is the essence of the phenomenon. In every 
hindrance of desire the sense of ideal presence of 
what is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which 
the only function of the present is to mean, is even 
more notoriously there. And in the movement of 
thoughts not ordinarily classed as involving desire, 
we have the same phenomenon. When I say Soc- 
rates is mortal, the moment Socrates is incomplete ; 
it falls forward through the is which is pure move- 
ment, into the mortal, which is indeed bare mortal 
on the tongue, but for the mind, is that mortal, the 
mortal Socrates, at last satisfactorily disposed of 
and told off. 

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulse of ex- 
perience which, taken as object, is change of feel- 
ing, and, taken as content, is feeling of change, is 
realized that absolute and essential self-transcend- 
ency which we swept away as an illusion when 

381 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1895 l 

we sought it between a content taken as a whole and 
a supposed objective thing outside. Here in the 
elementary datum of which both our physical and 
our mental worlds are built, we find included both 
the original of presence in absence and the proto- 
type of that operation of knowing many things to- 
gether which it is our business to discuss. 1 For 
the fact that past and future are already parts of 
the least experience that can really be, is just like 
what we find in any other case of an experience 
whose parts are many. Most of these experiences 

1 It seems to me that we have here something like what comes 
before us in the psychology of space and time. Our original 
intuition of space is the single field of view ; our original intui- 
tion of time covers but a few seconds ; yet by an ideal piecing 
together and construction we frame the notions of immensity 
and eternity, and suppose dated events and located things 
therein, of whose actual intervals we grasp no distinct idea. 
So in the case before us. The way in which the constituents 
of one undivided datum drag each other in and run into one, 
saying this is what that means, gives us our original intuition 
of what knowing is. That intuition we extend and construc- 
tively build up into the notion of a vast tissue of knowledge, 
shed along from experience to experience until, dropping the 
intermediary data from our thought, we assume that terms the 
most remote still know each other, just after the fashion of 
the parts of the prototypal fact. Cognition here is only con- 
structive, as we have already seen. But he who should say, 
arguing from its nature here, that it nowhere is direct, and 
seek to construct it without an originally given pattern, would 
be like those psychologists who profess to develop our idea of 
space out of the association of data that possess no original 
extensity. Grant the sort of thing that is meant by presence 
in absence, by self-transcendency, by reference to another, by 
pointing forward or back, by knowledge in short, somewhere in 
our experience, be it in ever so small a corner, and the con- 
struction of pseudo-cases elsewhere follows as a matter of 
course. But to get along without the real thing anywhere seems 
difficult indeed. 

382 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

are of objects perceived to be simultaneous and not 
to be immediately successive as in the heretofore 
considered case. The field of view, the chord of 
music, the glass of lemonade are examples. But 
the gist of the matter is the same — it is always 
knowing-together. You cannot separate the con- 
sciousness of one part from that of all the rest. 
What is given is pooled and mutual; there is no 
dark spot, no point of ignorance; no one fraction 
is eclipsed from any other's point of view. Can 
we account for such a being-known-together of 
complex facts like these? 

The general nature of it we can probably never 
account for, or tell how such a unity in manyness 
can be, for it seems to be the ultimate essence of 
all experience, and anything less than it apparently 
cannot be at all. But the particular conditions 
whereby we know particular things together might 
conceivably be traced, and to that humble task I beg 
leave to devote the time that remains. 



Ill 

Let me say forthwith that I have no pretension 
to give any positive solution. My sole ambition now 
is, by a little classification, to smooth the ground 
somewhat so that some of you, more able than I, 
may be helped to advance, before our next meeting 
perhaps, to results that I cannot obtain. 

Now, the first thing that strikes us in these com- 
plex cases is that the condition by which one thing 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS C 1895 ^ 

may come to be known together with other things 
is an event. It is often an event of the purely physi- 
cal order. A man walks suddenly into my field of 
view, and forthwith becomes part of it. I put a 
drop of cologne-water on my tongue, and, holding 
my nostrils, get the taste of it alone, but when I 
open my nostrils I get the smell together with the 
taste in mutual suffusion. Here it would seem as 
if a sufficient condition of the knowing of (say) 
three things together were the fact that the three 
several physical conditions of the knowing of each 
of them were realized at once. But in many other 
cases we find on the contrary that the physical con- 
ditions are realized without the things being known 
together at all. When absorbed in experiments 
with the cologne-water, for example, the clock may 
strike, and I not know that it has struck. But 
again, some seconds after the striking has elapsed, 
I may, by a certain shifting of what we call my 
attention, hark back to it and resuscitate the sound, 
and even count the strokes in memory. The condi- 
tion of knowing the clock's striking is here an event 
of the mental order which must be added to the 
physical event of the striking before I can know it 
and the cologne-water at once. Just so in the field 
of view I may entirely overlook and fail to notice 
even so important an object as a man, until the 
inward event of altering my attention makes me 
suddenly see him with the other objects there. In 
those curious phenomena of dissociation of con- 
sciousness with which recent studies of hypnotic, 

384 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

hysteric and trance states have made us familiar 
(phenomena which surely throw more new light 
on human nature than the work of all the psycho- 
physical laboratories put together), the event of 
hearing a "suggestion/' or the event of passing into 
trance or out of it, is what decides whether a human 
figure shall appear in the field of view or disappear, 
and whether a whole set of memories shall come 
before the mind together, along with its other ob- 
jects, or be excluded from their company. There 
is in fact no possible object, however completely ful- 
filled may be the outer condition of its perception, 
whose entrance into a given field of consciousness 
does not depend on the additional inner event called 
attention. 

Now, it seems to me that this need of a final 
inner event, over and above the mere sensorial con- 
ditions, quite refutes and disposes of the associa- 
tionist theory of the unity of consciousness. By 
associationist theory, I mean any theory that says, 
either implicitly or explicitly, that for a lot of ob- 
jects to be known together, it suffices that a lot of 
conscious states, each with one of them as its con- 
tent, should exist, as James Mill says, "synchron- 
ically." Synchronical existence of the ideas does 
not suffice, as the facts we now have abundantly 
show. Gurney's, Binet's, and Janet's proofs of sev- 
eral dissociated consciousnesses existing synchroni- 
cally, and dividing the subject's field of knowledge 
between them, is the best possible refutation of any 
such view. 

385 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1895 J 

Union in consciousness must be made by some- 
thing, must be brought about ; and to have perceived 
this truth is the great merit of the anti-association- 
ist psychologists. 1 The form of unity, they have ob- 
stinately said, must be specially accounted for ; and 
the form of unity the radical associationists have as 
obstinately shied away from and ignored, though 
their accounts of those preliminary conditions that 
supply the matters to be united have never been sur- 
passed. As far as these go, we are all, I trust, asso- 
ciationists, and reverers of the names of Hartley, 
Mill, and Bain. 

Let us now rapidly review the chief attempts of 
the anti-associationists to fill the gap they discern 
so well in the associationist tale. 

1. Attention. — Attention, we say, by turning to 
an object, includes it with the rest; and the nam- 
ing of this faculty in action has by some writers 
been considered a sufficient account of the decisive 
"event." 2 But it is plain that the act of Attention 

1 In this rapid paper I content myself with arguing from the 
experimental fact that something happens over and above the 
realization of sensorial conditions, wherever an object adds 
itself to others already "before the mind." I say nothing of 
the logical self-contradiction involved in the associationist doc- 
trine that the two facts, "A is known," and "B is known," are 
the third fact, "A -f- B are known together." Those whom the 
criticisms already extant in print of this strange belief have 
failed to convince, would not be persuaded, even though one 
rose from the dead. The appeal to the actual facts of dissocia- 
tion may make impression, however, even on such hardened 
hearts as theirs. 

2 It might seem natural to mention Wundt's doctrine of "Ap- 
perception" here. But I must confess my inability to say any- 
thing about it that would not resolve itself into a tedious com- 

386 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

itself needs a farther account to be given, and such 
an account is what other theories of the event im- 
plicitly give. 

We find four main types 1 of other theory of how 
particular things get known together, a physiologi- 
cal, a psychological, an animistic, and a transcend- 
entalist type. Of the physiological or "psycho- 
physical" type many varieties are possible, but it 
must be observed that none of them pretends to as- 
sign anything more than an empirical law. A 
psycho-physical theory can couple certain ante- 
cedent conditions with their result ; but an explana- 
tion, in the sense of an inner reason why the result 
should have the nature of one content with many 
parts instead of some entirely different nature, is 
what a psycho-physical theory cannot give. 2 

parison of texts. Being alternately described as intellection, 
will, feeling, synthesis, analysis, principle and result, it is too 
"protean" a function to lend itself to any simplified account 
at second hand. 

1 It is only for the sake of completeness that we need men- 
tion such notions of a sort of mechanical and chemical activity 
between the ideas as we find in Herbart, Steinthal, and others. 
These authors see clearly that mere syn chronical existence is 
not combination, and attribute to the ideas of dynamic influ- 
ences upon each other; pressures and resistances according to 
Herbart, and according to Steinthal "psychic attractions." 
But the philosophical foundations of such physical theories have 
been so slightly discussed by their authors that it is better to 
treat them only as rhetorical metaphors and pass on. Herbart, 
moreover, must also be mentioned later, along with the animis- 
tic writers. 

1 We find this impotence already when we seek the conditions 
of the passing pulse of consciousness, which, as we saw, always 
involves time and change. We account for the passing pulse, 
physiologically, by the overlapping of dying and dawning 

387 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS [1895] 

2. Reminiscence. — Now, empirically, we have 
learned that things must be known in succession 
and singly before they can be known together. 1 If 
A, B, and C, for example, were outer things that 
came for the first time and affected our senses all 
at once, we should get one content from the lot of 
them and make no discriminations. The content 
would symbolically point to the objects A, B, C, 
and eventually terminate there, but would contain 
no parts that were immediately apprehended as 
standing for A, B, and C severally. Let A, B, and C 
stand for pigments, or for a tone and its overtones, 
and you will see what I mean when I say that the 
first result on consciousness of their falling together 
on the eye or ear would be a single new kind of 
feeling rather than a feeling with three kinds of 
inner part. Such a result has been ascribed to a 
"fusion" of the three feelings of A, B, and C; but 
there seems no ground for supposing that, under the 
conditions assumed, these distinct feelings have ever 
been aroused at all. I should call the phenomenon 
one of indiscriminate knowing together, for the most 

brain-processes ; and at first sight the elements time and 
change, involved in both the brain-processes and their mental 
result, give a similarity that, we feel, might be the real reason 
for the psycho-physic coupling. But the moment we ask "meta- 
physical" questions — "Why not each brain-process felt apart? — 
Why just this amount of time, neither more nor less?" etc., 
etc. — we find ourselves falling back on the empirical view as the 
only safe one to defend. 

1 The latest empirical contribution to this subject, with which 
I am acquainted, is Dr. Herbert Nichols's excellent little mono- 
graph, Our Notions of Number and Space. Boston : Ginn & 
Co., 1894. 

388 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

we can say under the circumstances is that the con- 
tent resembles somewhat each of the objects A, B, 
and C, and knows them each potentially, knows 
them, that is, by possibly leading to each smoothly 
hereafter, as we know Indian tigers even whilst sit- 
ting in this room. 

But if our memory possess stored-up images of 
former A-s, B-s, and C-s, experienced in isolation, we 
get an altogether different content, namely, one 
through which we know A, B, and C together, and 
yet know each of them in discrimination through 
one of the content's own parts. This has been 
called a "colligation" or Verknilpfung of the "ideas" 
of A, B, and C, to distinguish it from the aforesaid 
fusion. Whatever we may call it, we see that its 
physiological condition is more complex than in the 
previous case. In both cases the outer objects, A, 
B, and C, exert their effects on the sensorium. But 
in this case there is a co-operation of higher tracts of 
memory which in the former case was absent. Dis- 
criminative knowing -tog ether, in short, involves 
higher processes of reminiscence. Do these give 
the element of manyness, whilst the lower sensorial 
processes that by themselves would result in mere 
"fusion," give the unity to the experience? The 
suggestion is one that might repay investigation, 
although it has against it two pretty solid objec- 
tions : first, that in man the consciousness attached 
to infra-cortical centres is altogether subliminal, if 
it exist; and, second, that in the cortex itself we 
have not yet discriminated sensorial from ideational 

389 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1895] 

processes. Possibly the frontal lobes, in which 
Wundt has supposed an Apperceptionsorgan, might 
serve a turn here. In any case it is certain that, 
into our present rough notions of the cortical func- 
tions, the future will have to weave distinctions at 
present unknown. 

3. Synergy. — The theory that, physiologically, the 
oneness precedes the manyness, may be contrasted 
with a theory that our colleagues Baldwin and 
Mtinsterberg are at present working out, and which 
places the condition of union of many data into 
one datum, in the fact that the many pour them- 
selves into one motor discharge. The motor dis- 
charge being the last thing to happen, the condi- 
tion of manyness would physiologically here precede 
and that of oneness follow. A printed word is ap- 
prehended as one object, at the same time that each 
letter in it is apprehended as one of its parts. Our 
secretary, Cattell, long ago discovered that we 
recognize words of four or five letters by the eye as 
quickly, or even more quickly, than we recognize 
single letters. Recognition means here the motor 
process of articulation; and the quickness comes 
from the fact that all the letters in the particular 
combination unhesitatingly co-operate in the one 
articulatory act. I suppose such facts as these to 
lie at the base of our colleagues' theories, which 
probably differ in detail, and which it would be 
manifestly unjust to discuss or guess about in ad- 
vance of their completer publication. Let me only 
say that I hope the latter may not be long delayed. 

390 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHEE 

These are the only types of physiological theory 
worthy of mention. I may next pass to what, for 
brevity's sake, may be called psychological accounts 
of the event that lets an object into consciousness, 
or, by not occurring, leaves it out. These accounts 
start from the fact that what figures as part of 
a larger object is often perceived to have relations 
to the other parts. Accordingly the event in ques- 
tion is described as an act of relating thought. It 
takes two forms. 

4. Relating to Self. — Some authors say that noth- 
ing can enter consciousness except on condition that 
it be related to the self. Not object, but object- 
plus-me, is the minimum knowable. 

5. Relating to other Objects. — Others think it 
enough if the incoming object be related to the 
other objects already there. To fail to appear re- 
lated is to fail to be known at all. To appear re- 
lated is to appear with other objects. If relations 
were correlates of special cerebral processes, the 
addition of these to the sensorial processes would be 
the wished-for event. But brain physiology as yet 
knows nothing of such special processes, so I have 
called this explanation purely psychological. There 
seem to be fatal objections to it as a universal state- 
ment, for the reference to self, if it exist, must in a 
host of cases be altogether subconscious; and intro- 
spection assures us that in many half -waking and 
half-drunken states the relations between things 
that we perceive together may be of the dimmest and 
most indefinable kind. 

391 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1895 l 

6. The Individual Soiil. — So we next proceed to 
the animistic account. By this term I mean to 
cover every sort of individualistic soul-theory. I 
will say nothing of older opinions; but in modern 
times we have two views of the way in which the 
union of a many by a soul occurs. For Herbart, 
for example, it occurs because the soul itself is 
unity, and all its Selbsterhaltungen are obliged to 
necessarily share this form. For our colleague Ladd, 
on the other hand, to take the best recent example, 
it occurs because the soul, which is a real unity 
indeed, furthermore performs a unifying act on the 
naturally separate data of sense — an act, moreover, 
for which no psycho-physical analogon can be found. 
It must be admitted that much of the reigning bias 
against the soul in so-called scientific circles is an 
unintelligent prejudice, traceable far more to a 
vague impression that it is a theological supersti- 
tion than to exact logical grounds. The soul is 
an "entity," and, indeed, that worst sort of entity, 
a "scholastic entity" ; and, moreover, it is something 
to be damned or saved; so let's have no more of 
it! I am free to confess that in my own case the 
antipathy to the soul with which I find myself 
burdened is an ancient hardness of heart of which 
I can frame no fully satisfactory account even to 
myself. I passively agree that if there were souls 
that we could use as principles of explanation, the 
formal settlement of the questions now before us 
could run far more smoothly towards its end. I 
admit that a soul is a medium of union, and that 

392 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHEK 

brain-processes and ideas, be they never so "syn- 
chronical." leave all mediating agency out. Yet. 
in spite of these concessions, I never find myself 
actively taking up the soul, so to speak, and mak- 
ing it to do work in my psychologizing. I speak of 
myself here because I am one amongst many, and 
probably few of us can give adequate reasons for 
our dislike. The more honor to our colleague from 
Yale, then, that he remains so unequivocally faith- 
ful to this unpopular principle! And let us hope 
that his forthcoming book may sweep what is blind 
in our hostility away. 1 

But all is not blind in our hostility. When, for 
example, you say that A, B, and C, which are dis- 
tinct contents on other occasions, are now on this 
occasion joined into the compound content ABC by 
a unifying act of the soul, you say little more than 
that now they are united, unless you give some hint 
as to how the soul unites them. When, for example. 

1 1 ought, perhaps, to apologize for not expunging from my 
printed text these references to Professor Ladd. which were 
based on the impression left on my mind by the termination of 
his Physiological Psychology. It would now appear from the 
paper read by him at the Princeton meeting, and his Philosophy 
of Mind, just published, that he disbelieves in the soul of old- 
fashioned ontology; and on looking again at the P. P.. I see 
that I may well have misinterpreted his deeper meaning there. 
I incline to suspect, however, that he had himself not fully 
disentangled it when that work was written; and that between 
now and then his thought has been evolving somewhat, as 
Lotze's did, between his Medical Psychology and his Meta- 
physic. It is gratifying to note these converging tendencies in 
different philosophers ; but I leave the text as I read it at 
Princeton, as a mark of what one could say not so very un- 
naturally at that date. 

393 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1895 l 

the hysteric women which Pierre Janet has studied 
with such loving care, go to pieces mentally, and 
their souls are unable any longer to connect the 
data of their experience together, though these data 
remain severally conscious in dissociation, what is 
the condition on which this inability of the soul 
depends? Is it an impotence in the soul itself? or 
is it an impotence in the physiological conditions, 
which fail to stimulate the soul sufficiently to its 
synthetic task? The how supposes on the soul's part 
a constitution adequate to the act. An hypothesis, 
we are told in the logic-books, ought to propose a 
being that has some other constitution and defini- 
tion than that of barely performing the phenome- 
non it is evoked to explain. When physicists pro- 
pose the "ether," for example, they propose it with 
a lot of incidental properties. But the soul pro- 
posed to us has no special properties or constitu- 
tion of which we are informed. Nevertheless, since 
particular conditions do determine its activity, it 
must have a constitution of some sort. In either 
case, we ought to know the facts. But the soul- 
doctrine, as hitherto professed, not only doesn't 
answer such questions, it doesn't even ask them; 
and it must be radically rejuvenated if it expects to 
be greeted again as a useful principle in psycho- 
logical philosophy. Here is work for our spiritual- 
ist colleagues, not only for the coming year, but for 
the rest of their lives. 1 

1 The soul can be taken in three ways as a unifying principle. 
An already existing lot of animated sensations (or other psychic 

394 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

7. The World-soul. — The second spiritualist the- 
ory may be named as that of transcendentalism. 
I take it typically and not as set forth by any single 
author. Transcendentalism explains things by an 
over-soul of which all separate souls, sensations, 
thoughts, and data generally are parts. To be, as 
it would be known together with everything else in 
the world by this over-soul, is for transcendentalism 
the true condition of each single thing, and to pass 
into this condition is for things to fulfil their voca- 
tion. Such being known together, since it is the 
innermost reality of life, cannot on transcendentalist 
principles be explained or accounted for as a work 
wrought on a previous sort of reality. The monadic 
soul-theory starts with separate sensational data, 
and must show how they are made one. The tran- 
scendentalist theory has rather for its task to show 
how, being one, they can spuriously and illusorily 
be made to appear separate. The problem for the 

data) may be simply woven into one by it; in which case the 
form of unity is the soul's only contribution, and the original 
stuff of the Many remains in the One as its stuff also. Or, 
secondly, the resultant synthetic One may be regarded as an 
immanent reaction of the Soul on the preexisting psychic 
Many; and in this case the Soul, in addition to creating the 
new form, reproduces in itself the old stuff of the Many, super- 
seding it for our use, and making it for us become subliminal, 
but not suppressing its existence. Or, thirdly, the One may 
again be the Soul's immanent reaction on a physiological, not 
on a mental, Many. In this case preexisting sensations or ideas 
would not be there at all, to be either woven together or super- 
seded. The synthetic One would be a primal psychic datum 
with parts, either of which might know the same object that a 
possible sensation, realized under other physiological conditions, 
could also know. 

395 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 18 ^ 

monadic soul, in short, is that of unification, and 
the problem for the over-soul is that of insulation. 
The removal of insulating obstructions would suffi- 
ciently account for things reverting to their natural 
place in the over-soul and being known together. 
The most natural insulating or individualizing prin- 
ciple to invoke is the bodily organism. As the pipes 
of an organ let the pressing mass of air escape only 
in single notes, so do our brains, the organ pipes 
of the infinite, keep back everything but the slender 
threads of truth to which they may be pervious. 
As they obstruct more, the insulation increases, as 
they obstruct less it disappears. Now transcen- 
dental philosophers have as a rule not done 
much dabbling in psychology. But one sees no ab- 
stract reason why they might not go into psychology 
as fully as any one, and erect a psycho-physical 
science of the conditions of more separate and less 
separate cognition which would include all the 
facts that psycho-physicists in general might dis- 
cover. And they would have the advantage over 
other psycho-physicists of not needing to explain 
the nature of the resultant knowing-together when 
it should occur, for they could say that they simply 
begged it as the ultimate nature of the world. 

This is as broad a disjunction as I can make of 
the different ways in which men have considered 
the conditions of our knowing things together. You 
will agree with me that I have brought no new in- 
sight to the subject, and that I have only gos- 
siped to while away this unlucky presidential 

C96 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

hour to which the constellations doomed me at my 
birth. But since gossip we have had to have, let me 
make the hour more gossipy still by saying a final 
word about the position taken up in my own Prin- 
ciples of Psychology on the general question before 
us, a position which, as you doubtless remember, was 
so vigorously attacked by our colleague from the 
University of Pennsylvania at our meeting in New 
York a year ago. 1 That position consisted in this, 
that I proposed to simply eliminate from psychology 
"considered as a natural science" the whole business 
of ascertaining how we come to know things together 
or to know them at all. Such considerations, I said, 
should fall to metaphysics. That we do know 
things, sometimes singly and sometimes together, is 
a fact. That states of consciousness are the vehicle 
of the knowledge, and depend on brain states, are 
two other facts. And I thought that a natural 
science of psychology might legitimately confine 
itself to tracing the functional variations of these 
three sorts of fact, and ascertaining and tracing 
what determinate bodily states are the condition 
when the states of mind know determinate things 
and groups of things. Most states of mind can be 
designated only by naming what objects they are 
"thoughts-of," i.e., what things they know. 

Most of those which know compound things are 
utterly unique and solitary mental entities demon- 

1 Printed as an article entitled "The Psychological Stand- 
point," in this [Psychological'] Rcvieiv, Vol. I., p. 113. (March, 1894.) 
[The author was G. S. Fullerton. For James's own earlier views, 
cf. the Principles (1890), especially Chaps. VI., IX. Ed.] 

397 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1895 -i 

strably different from any collection of simpler 
states to which the same objects might be singly 
known. 1 Treat them all as unique in entity, I said 

*When they know conceptually they don't even remotely re- 
semble the simpler states. When they know intuitively they 
resemble, sometimes closely, sometimes distantly, the simpler 
states. The sour and sweet in lemonade are extremely unlike 
the sour and sweet of lemon juice and sugar, singly taken, yet 
like enough for us to "recognize" these "objects" in the com- 
pound taste. The several objective "notes" recognized in the 
chord sound differently and peculiarly there. In a motley field 
of view successive and simultaneous contrast give to each sev- 
eral tint a different hue and luminosity from that of the "real" 
color into which it turns when viewed without its neighbors 
by a rested eye. The difference is sometimes so slight, however, 
that we overlook the "representative" character of each of the 
parts of a complex content, and speak as if the latter were a 
cluster of the original "intuitive" states of mind that, occurring 
singly, know the "object's" several parts in separation. Pro- 
fessor Meinong, for example, even after the true state of 
things had been admirably set forth by Herr H. Cornelius (in 
the Vierteljahrschrift f. wiss. Phil, XVI., 404; XVII., 30), re- 
turns to the defence of the radical associationist view (in the 
Zeitschrift f. Psychologie, VI., 340, 417). According to him, the 
single sensations of the several notes lie unaltered in the chord- 
sensations ; but his analysis of the phenomenon is vitiated by 
his non-recognition of the fact that the same objects (i.e., the 
notes) can be known representatively through one compound 
state of mind, and directly in several simple ones, without the 
simple and the compound states having strictly anything in 
common with each other. In Meinong's earlier work, Ueber 
Begriff und Eigenschaften der Empfindung (Vierteljahr- 
schrift, Vol. XII.), he seems to me to have hit the truth much 
better, when he says that the aspect color, e.g., in a concrete 
sensation of red, is not an abs tractable part of the sensation, 
but an external relation of resemblance between that sensation 
and other sensations to the whole lot of which we give the name 
of colors. Such, I should say, are the aspects of c, e, g and c' 
in the chord. We may call them parts of the chord if we like, 
but they are not bits of it, identical with c's, e's, g's, and c"s 
elsewhere. They simply resemble the c's, e's, g's, and c"s else- 
where, and know these contents or objects representatively. 

398 



[1895] KNOWING OF THINGS TOGETHER 

then; let their complexity reside in their plural 
cognitive function; and you have a psychology 
which, if it doesn't ultimately explain the facts, 
also does not, in expressing them, make them self- 
contradictory (as the associationist psychology does 
when it calls them many ideas fused into one idea) 
or pretend to explain them (as the soul-theory so 
often does) by a barren verbal principle. 

My intention was a good one, and a natural 
science infinitely more complete than the psychol- 
ogies we now possess could be written without aban- 
doning its terms. Like all authors, I have, there- 
fore, been surprised that this child of my genius 
should not be more admired by others — should, in 
fact, have been generally either misunderstood or 
despised. But do not fear that on this occasion I 
am either going to defend or to re-explain the bant- 
ling. I am going to make things more harmonious 
by simply giving it up. 1 I have become convinced 
since publishing that book that no conventional re- 
strictions can keep metaphysical and so-called epi- 
stemological inquiries out of the psychology books. 
I see, moreover, better now than then that my pro- 
posal to designate mental states merely by their 
cognitive function leads to a somewhat strained way 
of talking of dreams and reveries, and to quite an 
unnatural way of talking of some emotional states. 
I am willing, consequently, henceforward that men- 

[ 2 But cf. Pluralistic Universe (1909), p. 338, note, where it 
appears that he does not abandon his earlier view unquali- 
fiedly. Ed.] 

399 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1895 l 

tal contents should be called complex, just as their 
objects are, and this even in psychology. Not 
because their parts are separable, as the parts of 
objects are, not because they have an eternal or 
quasi-eternal individual existence, like the parts of 
objects; for the various "contents" of which they 
are parts are integers, existentially, and their parts 
only live as long as they live. Still, in them, we can 
call parts, parts. — But when, without circumlocu- 
tion or disguise, I thus come over to your views, I 
insist that those of you who applaud me (if any 
such there be) should recognize the obligations 
which the new agreement imposes on yourselves. 
Not till you have dropped the old phrases, so absurd 
or so empty, of ideas "self-compounding" or "united 
by a spiritual principle" ; not till you have in your 
turn succeeded in some such long inquiry into con- 
ditions as the one I have just failed in ; not till you 
have laid bare more of the nature of that altogether 
unique kind of complexity in unity which mental 
states involve; not till then, I say, will psychology 
reach any real benefit from the conciliatory spirit 
of which I have done what I can to set an example. 



400 



XXVII 
DEGENERATION AND GENIUS x 

[1895] 

If the reviewer might now say a word of the 
result left on his own mind by reading the genius- 
controversy, it would run something like this: 
Moreau, Lombroso & Co. have done excellent ser- 
vice in destroying the classic view of genius as 
something superhuman and flawless. By their fer- 
reting and prying and general devil's advocacy, they 
have helped us to an acquaintance with human 
nature in concrete*, which from every point of view 
is superior to our old-fashioned academic notions. 
Lombroso in particular has put us in his debt by 
his studies of individual fanatics and "mattoids." 
But there the service stops, for (except in Nordau's 
case) these authors are incapable of logical or 
psychological analysis; and the only conclusion 
that their facts make more clear than ever — the con- 
clusion, namely, that there are no incompatibles in 
human nature, and that any random combination of 

[ lr rhe concluding paragraphs of a series of notices and re- 
views of J. Dallemagne's Degmere's et D6s6quilil)res, C. Lom- 
broso's Entartung und Genie, M. Nordau's Degeneration and 
W. Hirscli's Genie und Entartung. Reprinted from Psychological 
Review, 1895, 2, 292-294. Ed.] 

401 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1895 ] 

mental elements that can be conceived may also be 
realized in some individual — is one that they do not 
draw. If we are to make of genius a psychological 
conception at all, it must be a property of intellect 
rather than of will or feeling. Narrowed in this 
way, Professor Bain's description of it, as an un- 
usual tendency to associate by similarity (a descrip- 
tion with which none of our authors seem ac- 
quainted), will stand firm. But it is one thing to 
have this intellectual condition of genius and an- 
other to become effective in history as a genius, and 
to figure in biographical dictionaries. We all know 
intellects of first-rate original quality whose names 
are written in water because of the inferiority of 
the other elements of their nature, their lack of re- 
mote ideals and unifying aims, of passion and of 
staying power. On the other hand we know moder- 
ate intellects who become effective and even famous 
in the world's work because of their force of char- 
acter, their passionate interests and doggedness of 
will. To do anything with one's genius requires 
passion; to do much requires doggedness. Hence 
it comes that the intense sensibility of the psycho- 
pathic temperament, when it adds itself to a first- 
rate intellect, greatly increases the chances that the 
latter will bear effective fruits. To be liable to ob- 
session by ideas, not to be able to rest till they are 
"worked off," ought then to be, as they indeed are, 
traits of character often found amongst the men 
whose names figure as those of geniuses in the 
cyclopedias. But these traits have no essential con- 

402 



[1895] DEGENERATION AND GENIUS 

nection with the sort of intellect that makes the 
men geniuses. We may find them combined with 
any sort of intellect, as we find first-rate intellect 
combined with any sort of character. The names 
of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and 
Holmes would probably be those first written by 
any one who should be asked for a list of the 
geniuses of the community in which I write. Al- 
though belonging to the class of poets (the species 
of genius most akin to psychopathy by the sensibil- 
ity it demands), these men were all distinguished 
for balance of character and common sense. So 
Schiller, so Browning, so George Sand. In poets 
like Shelley, Poe, de Musset, on the other hand, we 
have the intellectual and passionate gifts without 
the powers of inhibition. In the sphere of action 
we have a similar diversity of mixture : we find the 
all-round men like Washington, Cavour, and Glad- 
stone ; the great intellects and wills with no hearts, 
like Frederick the Great; the intense hearts and 
wills with narrow intellects, like Garibaldi and 
John Brown; the stubborn wills with mediocre 
hearts and intellects, like George III. or Philip II. ; 
and, finally, the real cranks and half -insane fana- 
tics, often with much of the equipment of effective 
genius except a normal set of "ideas." It all de- 
pends on the mixture ; only as the elements vary in- 
dependently, the chances that a freak of nature in 
the line of human greatness will be as exceptionally 
str-ong in all three elements of character as he is in 
any one of them, are small. Hence some lop-sided- 

403 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1895 l 

ness in almost all distinguished personages, hence 
the rarity of the Dantes, St. Bernards, and Goethes 
among the children of men. 

One more word : there is a strong tendency among 
these pathological writers to represent the line of 
mental health as a very narrow crack, which one 
must tread with bated breath, between foul fiends on 
the one side and gulfs of despond on the other. Now, 
health is a term of subjective appreciation, not of 
objective description, to borrow a nomenclature 
from Professor Royce :it is a teleological term. There 
is no purely objective standard of sound health. 
Any peculiarity that is of use to a man is a point 
of soundness in him, and what makes a man sound 
for one function may make him unsound for an- 
other. Moreover, we are all instruments for social 
use; and if sensibilities, obsessions, and other psy- 
chopathic peculiarities can so combine with the rest 
of our constitution as to make us the more useful to 
our kind, why then we should not call them in that 
context points of unhealthiness, but rather the 
reverse. 

The trouble is that such writers as Nordau use 
the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an 
artifice for giving objective authority to their per- 
sonal dislikes. The medical terms become mere 
"appreciative" clubs to knock men down with. Call 
a man a "cad" and you've settled his social status. 
Call him a "degenerate," and you've grouped him 
with the most loathsome specimens of the race, in 
spite of the fact that he may be one of its most 

404 



[1895] DEGENERATION AND GENIUS 

precious members. The only sort of being, in fact, 
who can remain as the typical normal man, after all 
the individuals with degenerative symptoms have 
been rejected, must be a perfect nullity. He must, 
it is true, be able to perform the necessities of na- 
ture and adapt himself to his environment so as to 
come in when it rains; but being free from all the 
excesses and superfluities that make Man's life in- 
teresting, without love, poetry, art, religion, or any 
other ideal than pride in his non-neurotic constitu- 
tion, he is the human counterpart of that "temper- 
ance" hotel of which the traveller's handbook said, 
"It possesses no other quality to recommend it." 
We all remember the sort of school-boy who used to 
ask us six times a day to feel of his biceps. The 
sort of man who pounds his mental chest and says 
to us, "See, there isn't a morbid fibre in my composi- 
tion !" is like unto him. Few more profitless mem- 
bers of the race can be found. The real lesson of 
the genius-books is that we should welcome sensibil- 
ities, impulses, and obsessions if we have them, so 
long as by their means the field of our experience 
grows deeper and we contribute the better to the 
race's stores ; that we should broaden our notion of 
health instead of narrowing it; that we should re- 
gard no single element of weakness as fatal — in 
short, that we should not be afraid of life. 



405 



XXVIII 

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS AND 
PEACTICAL EESULTS x 

[1898] 

An occasion like the present would seem to call 
for an absolutely untechnical discourse. I ought to 
speak of something connected with life rather than 
with logic. I ought to give a message with a prac- 
tical outcome and an emotional musical accompani- 
ment, so to speak, fitted to interest men as men, and 
yet also not altogether to disappoint philosophers — 
since philosophers, let them be as queer as they will, 

C 1 Reprinted from The University Chronicle (Berkeley, Cali- 
fornia) September, 1898. An address delivered before the 
Philosophical Union of the University of California on August 
26, 1898. It was reprinted with slight verbal revision, and with 
omission of first three pages, and concluding paragraph, in 
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, . 
1904, 1, 673-687, under the title of "The Pragmatic Method."j 
Afterwards most of pages 410-411 was used in the Varieties of 
Religious Experience (1902), p. 444; and pp. 415-424 were re- 
printed with further slight revision in Pragmatism (1907), pp. 
97-108. This article marks the beginning of the pragmatist 
movement. Nine years later, speaking of the pragmatist principle 
which he attributed to Charles Peirce, James wrote: "It lay 
entirely unnoticed by any one for twenty years, until I, in an 
address before Professor Howison's philosophical union at the 
University of California, brought it forward again and made a 
special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the 
times seemed ripe for its reception. The word 'pragmatism' 
spread, and at present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophi- 
cal journals" {Pragmatism, 1907, p. 47. Ed.] 

406 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

still are men in the secret recesses of their hearts, 
even here at Berkeley. I ought, I say, to produce 
something simple enough to catch and inspire the 
rest of you, and yet with just enough of ingenuity 
and oddity about it to keep the members of the 
Philosophical Union from yawning and letting their 
attention wander away. 

I confess that I have something of this kind in my 
mind, a perfectly ideal discourse for the present 
occasion. Were I to set it down on paper, I verily 
believe it would be regarded by everyone as the 
final word of philosophy. It would bring theory 
down to a single point, at which every human 
being's practical life would begin. It would solve 
all the antinomies and contradictions, it would let 
loose all the right impulses and emotions ; and every- 
one, on hearing it, would say, "Why, that is the 
truth ! — that is what I have been believing, that is 
what I have really been living on all this time, but 
I never could find the words for it before. All that 
eludes, all that flickers and twinkles, all that in- 
vites and vanishes even whilst inviting, is here made 
a solidity and a possession. Here is the end of un- 
satisfactoriness, here the beginning of unimpeded 
clearness, joy, and power." Yes, my friends, I have 
such a discourse within me ! But, do not judge me 
harshly, I cannot produce it on the present occasion. 
I humbly apologize; I have come across the conti- 
nent to this wondrous Pacific Coast — to this Eden, 
not of the mythical antiquity, but of the solid future 
of mankind — I ought to give you something worthy 

407 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1 ^] 

of your hospitality, and not altogether unworthy of 
your great destiny, to help cement our rugged East 
and your wondrous West together in a spiritual 
bond, — and yet, and yet, and yet, I simply cannot. 
I have tried to articulate it, but it will not come. 
Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path- 
finders. What every one can feel, what every one 
can know in the bone and marrow of him, they 
sometimes can find words for and express. The 
words and thoughts of the philosophers are not ex- 
actly the words and thoughts of the poets — worse 
luck. But both alike have the same function. They 
are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, or blazes, — 
blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the 
trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human ex- 
perience. They give you somewhere to go from. 
They give you a direction and a place to reach. 
They do not give you the integral forest with all its 
sunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and won- 
ders. Ferny dells, and mossy waterfalls, and secret 
magic nooks escape you, owned only by the wild 
things to whom the region is a home. Happy they 
without the need of blazes! But to us the blazes 
give a sort of ownership. We can now use the for- 
est, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its 
quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lost 
in and never return. The poet's words and the 
philosopher's phrases thus are helps of the most 
genuine sort, giving to all of us hereafter the free- 
dom of the trails they made. Though they create 
nothing, yet for this marking and fixing function 

408 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

of theirs we bless their names and keep them on our 
lips, even whilst the thin and spotty and half- 
casual character of their operations is evident to 
our eyes. 

No one like the pathfinder himself feels the im- 
mensity of the forest, or knows the accidentality of 
his own trails. Columbus, dreaming of the ancient 
East, is stopped by poor pristine simple America, 
and gets no farther on that day ; and the poets and 
philosophers themselves know as no one else knows 
that what their formulas express leaves unexpressed 
almost everything that they organically divine and 
feel. So I feel that there is a centre in truth's 
forest where I have never been : to track it out and 
get there is the secret spring of all my poor life's 
philosophic efforts ; at moments I almost strike into 
the final valley, there is a gleam of the end, a sense 
of certainty, but always there comes still another 
ridge, so my blazes merely circle towards the true 
direction; and although now, if ever, would be the 
fit occasion, yet I cannot take you to the wondrous 
hidden spot to-day. To-morrow it must be, or to- 
morrow, or to-morrow, and pretty surely death will 
overtake me ere the promise is fulfilled. 

Of such postponed achievements do the lives of all 
philosophers consist. Truth's fulness is elusive; 
ever not quite, not quite! So we fall back on the 
preliminary blazes — a few formulas, a few technical 
conceptions, a few verbal pointers — which at least 
define the initial direction of the trail. And that, 
to my sorrow, is all that I can do here at Berkeley 

409 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 1898 ] 

to-day. Inconclusive I must be, and merely sugges- 
tive, though I will try to be as little technical as I 
can. 

I will seek to define with you merely what seems 
to be the most likely direction in which to start 
upon the trail of truth. Years ago this direction 
was given to me by an American philosopher whose 
home is in the East, and whose published works, 
few as they are and scattered in periodicals, are no 
fit expression of his powers. I refer to Mr. Charles 
S. Peirce, with whose very existence as a philos- 
opher I dare say many of you are unacquainted. He 
is one of the most original of contemporary think- 
ers; and the principle of practicalism — or pragma- 
tism, as he called it, when I first heard him enunci- 
ate it at Cambridge in the early '70's — is the clue or 
compass by following which I find myself more and 
more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet 
upon the proper trail. 

Peirce's principle, as we may call it, may be ex- 
pressed in a variety of ways, all of them very simple. 
In the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, 
he introduces it as follows : The soul and meaning 
of thought, he says, can never be made to direct 
itself towards anything but the production of belief, 
belief being the demicadence which closes a musical 
phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life. 
Thought in movement has thus for its only possible 
motive the attainment of thought at rest. But when 
our thought about an object has found its rest in 
belief, then our action on the subject can firmly and 

410 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are really rules for 
action; and the whole function of thinking is but 
one step in the production of habits of action. If 
there were any part of a thought that made no 
difference in the thought's practical consequences, 
then that part would be no proper element of the 
thought's significance. Thus the same thought may 
be clad in different words ; but if the different words 
suggest no different conduct, they are mere outer 
accretions, and have no part in the thought's mean- 
ing. If, however, they determine conduct differ- 
ently, they are essential elements of the significance. 
"Please open the door," and, "Veuillez ouvrir la 
porte" in French, mean just the same thing; but 
"D — n you, open the door," although in English, 
means something very different. Thus to develop a 
thought's meaning we need only determine what 
conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for 
us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at 
the root of all our thought-distinctions, however 
subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to 
consist in anything but a possible difference of prac- 
tice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts 
of an object, then, we need only consider what ef- 
fects of a conceivably practical kind the object may 
involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, 
and what reactions we must prepare. Our concep- 
tion of these effects, then, is for us the whole of our 
conception of the object, so far as that conception 
has positive significance at all. 

This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of 

411 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS [1898] 

pragmatism. I think myself that it should be ex- 
pressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it. 
The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is 
indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires. But it 
inspires that conduct because it first foretells some 
particular turn to our experience which shall call 
for just that conduct from us. And I should prefer 
for our purposes this evening to express Peirce's 
principle by saying that the effective meaning of any 
philosophic proposition can always be brought down 
to some particular consequence, in our future prac- 
tical experience, whether active or passive; the 
point lying rather in the fact that the experience 
must be particular, than in the fact that it must be 
active. 

To take in the importance of this principle, one 
must get accustomed to applying it to concrete 
cases. Such use as I am able to make of it con- 
vinces me that to be mindful of it in philosophical 
disputations tends wonderfully to smooth out mis- 
understandings and to bring in peace. If it did 
nothing else, then, it would yield a sovereignly 
valuable rule of method for discussion. So I shall 
devote the rest of this precious hour with you to its 
elucidation, because I sincerely think that if you 
once grasp it, it will shut your steps out from many 
an old false opening, and head you in the true 
direction for the trail. 

One of its first consequences is this. Suppose 
there are two different philosophical definitions, or 
propositions, or maxims, or what not, which seem 

412 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

to contradict each other, and about which men dis- 
pute. If, by supposing the truth of the one, you can 
foresee no conceivable practical consequence to any- 
body at any time or place, which is different from 
what you would foresee if you supposed the truth 
of the other, why then the difference between the 
two propositions is no difference, — it is only a 
specious and verbal difference, unworthy of further 
contention. Both formulas mean radically the 
same thing, although they may say it in such dif- 
ferent words. It is astonishing to see how many 
philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance 
the moment you subject them to this simple test. 
There can be no difference which doesn't make a dif- 
ference^ — no difference in abstract truth which does 
not express itself in a difference of concrete fact, 
and of conduct consequent upon the fact, imposed 
on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. 
It is true that a certain shrinkage of values often 
seems to occur in our general formulas when we 
measure their meaning in this prosaic and practical 
way. They diminish. But the vastness that is 
merely based on vagueness is a false appearance of 
importance, and not a vastness worth retaining. 
The ar's, y% and £-s always do shrivel, as I have 
heard a learned friend say, whenever at the end of 
your algebraic computation they change into so 
many plain a's, fr's, and c's ; but the whole function 
of algebra is, after all, to get them into that more 
definite shape ; and the whole function of philosophy 
ought to be to find out what definite difference it 

413 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1898 ^ 

will make to you and me, at definite instants of our 
life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be 
the one which is true. 

If we start off with an impossible case, we shall 
perhaps all the more clearly see the use and scope 
of our principle. Let us, therefore, put ourselves, 
in imagination, in a position from which no fore- 
casts of consequence, no dictates of conduct, can 
possibly be made, so that the principle of pragma- 
tism finds no field of application. Let us, I mean, 
assume that the present moment is the absolutely 
last moment of the world, with bare nonentity be- 
yond it, and no hereafter for either experience or 
conduct. 

Now I say that in that case there would be no 
sense whatever in some of our most urgent and en- 
venomed philosophical and religious debates. The 
question is, "Is matter the producer of all things, 
or is a God there too?" would, for example, offer a 
perfectly idle and insignificant alternative if the 
world were finished and no more of it to come. 
Many of us, most of us, I think, now feel as if a ter- 
rible coldness and deadness would come over the 
world were we forced to believe that no informing 
spirit or purpose had to do with it, but it merely 
accidentally had come. The actually experienced 
details of fact might be the same on either hypoth- 
esis, some sad, some joyous; some rational, some 
odd and grotesque ; but without a God behind them, 
we think they would have something ghastly, they 
would tell no genuine story, there would be no spec- 

414 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

ulation in those eyes that they do glare with. With 
the God, on the other hand, they would grow solid, 
warm, and altogether full of real significance. 

But I say that such an alternation of feelings, 
reasonable enough in a consciousness that is pro- 
spective, as ours now is, and whose world is partly 
yet to come, would be absolutely senseless and irra- 
tional in a purely retrospective consciousness sum- 
ming up a world already past. For such a con- 
sciousness, no emotional interest could attach to the 
alternative. The problem would be purely intel- 
lectual; and if unaided matter could, with any 
scientific plausibility, be shown to cipher out the 
actual facts, then not the faintest shadow ought to 
cloud the mind, of regret for the God that by the 
same ciphering would prove needless and disappear 
from our belief. 

For just consider the case sincerely, and say what 
would be the worth of such a God if he were there, 
with his work accomplished and his world run 
down. 1 He would be worth no more than just that 
world was worth. To that amount of result, with 
its mixed merits and defects, his creative power 
could attain, but go no farther. And since there is 

[* Of this and the following passage James later wrote : "I 
had no sooner given the address than I perceived a flaw in that 
part of it ; but I have left the passage unaltered ever since, be- 
cause the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. . . . Even if 
matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea 
of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief call for 
a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly 
recognize them and judge them sympathetically" {The Meaning 
of Truth, 1909, pp. 189-190, note). Ed.] 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS [ 18 98] 

to be no future ; since the whole value and meaning 
of the world has been already paid in and actualized 
in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and 
now go with it in the ending ; since it draws no sup- 
plemental significance (such as our real world 
draws) from its function of preparing something 
yet to come ; why then, by it we take God's measure, 
as it were. He is the Being who could once for all 
do that; and for that much we are thankful to him, 
but for nothing more. But now, on the contrary 
hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter follow- 
ing their "laws" could make that world and do no 
less, should we not be just as thankful to them? 
Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped 
God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone 
responsible? Where would the special deadness, 
"crassness," and ghastliness come in? And how, 
experience being what it is once for all, would God's 
presence in it make it any more "living," any richer 
in our sight? 

Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to 
this question. The actually experienced world is 
supposed to be the same in its details on either 
hypothesis, "the same, for our praise or blame," as 
Browning says. It stands there indefeasibly ; a gift 
which can't be taken back. Calling matter the cause 
of it retracts no single one of the items that have 
made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment 
them. They are the God or the atoms, respectively, 
of just that and no other world. The God, if there, 
has been doing just what atoms could do — appear- 

416 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

ing in the character of atoms, so to speak — and 
earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no 
more. If his presence lends no different turn or 
issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no 
increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come to 
it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only 
actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and 
the curtain down, you really make it no better by 
claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as 
you make it no worse by calling him a common 
hack. 

Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct 
is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate 
between materialism and theism becomes quite idle 
and insignificant. Matter and God in that event 
mean exactly the same thing — the power, namely, 
neither more nor less, that can make just this mixed, 
imperfect, yet completed world — and the wise man 
is he who in such a case would turn his back on such 
a supererogatory discussion. Accordingly most men 
instinctively — and a large class of men, the so- 
called positivists or scientists, deliberately — do turn 
their backs on philosophical disputes from which 
nothing in the line of definite future consequences 
can be seen to follow. The verbal and empty char- 
acter of our studies is surely a reproach with which 
you of the Philosophical Union are but too sadly 
familiar. An escaped Berkeley student said to me 
at Harvard the other day, — he had never been 
in the philosophical department here, — "Words, 
words, words, are all that you philosophers care 

417 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1898 l 

for." We philosophers think it all unjust; and yet, 
if the principle of pragmatism be true, it is a per- 
fectly sound reproach unless the metaphysical alter- 
natives under investigation can be shown to have al- 
ternative practical outcomes, however delicate and 
distant these may be. The common man and the 
scientist can discover no such outcomes. And if the 
metaphysician can discern none either, the common 
man and scientist certainly are in the right of it, as 
against him. His science is then but pompous 
trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for 
such a being would be something really absurd. 

Accordingly, in every genuine metaphysical de- 
bate some practical issue, however remote, is really 
involved. To realize this, revert with me to the 
question of materialism or theism ; and place your- 
selves this time in the real world we live in, the 
world that has a future, that is yet uncompleted 
whilst we speak. In this unfinished world the al- 
ternative of "materialism or theism?" is intensely 
practical ; and it is worth while for us to spend some 
minutes of our hour in seeing how truly this is the 
case. 

How, indeed, does the programme differ for us, 
according as we consider that the facts of experience 
up to date are purposeless configurations of atoms 
moving according to eternal elementary laws, or 
that on the other hand they are due to the provi- 
dence of God? As far as the past facts go, indeed 
there is no difference. These facts are in, are bagged, 
are captured ; and the good that's in them is gained, 

418 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

be the atoms or be the God their cause. There are 
accordingly many materialists about us to-day who, 
ignoring altogether the future and practical aspects 
of the question, seek to eliminate the odium attach- 
ing to the word materialism, and even to eliminate 
the word itself, by showing that, if matter could 
give birth to all these gains, why then matter, func- 
tionally considered, is just as divine an entity as 
God, in fact coalesces with God, is what you mean 
by God. Cease, these persons advise us, to use 
either of these terms, with their outgrown opposi- 
tion. Use terms free of the clerical connotations on 
the one hand; of the suggestion of grossness, 
coarseness, ignobility, on the other. Talk of the 
primal mystery, of the unknowable energy, of the 
one and only power, instead of saying either God 
or matter. This is the course to which Mr. Spencer 
urges us at the end of the first volume of his 
Psychology. In some well- written pages he there 
shows us that a "matter" so infinitely subtile, and 
performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine 
as modern science postulates in her explanations, 
has no trace of grossness left. He shows that the 
conception of spirit, as we mortals hitherto have 
framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite 
complexity of Nature's facts. Both terms, he says, 
are but symbols, pointing to that one unknowable 
reality in which their oppositions cease. 

Throughout these remarks of Mr. Spencer, elo- 
quent, and even noble in a certain sense, as they are, 
he seems to think that the dislike of the ordinary 

419 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1898 l 

man to materialism comes from a purely aesthetic 
disdain of matter, as something gross in itself, and 
vile and despicable. Undoubtedly such an aesthetic 
disdain of matter has played a part in philosophic 
history. But it forms no part whatever of an intel- 
ligent modern man's dislikes. Give him a matter 
bound forever by its laws to lead our world nearer 
and nearer to perfection, and any rational man will 
worship that matter as readily as Mr. Spencer wor- 
ships his own so-called unknowable power. It not 
only has made for righteousness up to date, but it 
will make for righteousness forever; and that is all 
we need. Doing practically all that a God can do, 
it is equivalent to God, its function is a God's func- 
tion, and in a world in which a God would be super- 
fluous; from such a world a God could never law- 
fully be missed. 

But is the matter by which Mr. Spencer's process 
of cosmic evolution is carried on any such principle 
of never-ending perfection as this? Indeed it is not, 
for the future end of every cosmically evolved thing 
or system of things is tragedy ; and Mr. Spencer, in 
confining himself to the aesthetic and ignoring the 
practical side of the controversy, has really con- 
tributed nothing serious to its relief. But apply 
now our principle of practical results, and see what 
a vital significance the question of materialism or 
theism immediately acquires. 

Theism and materialism, so indifferent when 
taken retrospectively, point when we take them 
prospectively to wholly different practical conse- 

420 



[1S98] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

quences, to opposite outlooks of experience. For, 
according to the theory of mechanical evolution, the 
laws of redistribution of matter and motion, though 
they are certainly to thank for all the good hours 
which our organisms have ever yielded us and 
for all the ideals which our minds now frame, 
are yet fatally certain to undo their work 
again, and to redissolve everything that they 
have once evolved. You all know the picture 
of the last foreseeable state of the dead uni- 
verse, as evolutionary science gives it forth. I 
cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour's words : 
a The energies of our system will decay, the glory of 
the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and 
inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for 
a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go 
down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. 
The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure 
corner has for a brief space broken the contented 
silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will 
know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' 
and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger 
than death, will be as if they had not been. Xor 
will anything that is, be better or worse for all that 
the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man 
have striven through countless ages to effect." 1 

That is the sting of it, that in the vast driftings 
of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled 
shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank 
floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved — even 

1 The Foundations of Belief, p. 30. 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS H898] 

as our world now lingers, for our joy — yet when 
these transient products are gone, nothing, abso- 
lutely nothing remains, to represent those particu- 
lar qualities, those elements of preciousness which 
they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, 
gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. 
Without an echo; without a memory; without an 
influence on aught that may come after, to make 
it care for similar ideals. This utter final wreck 
and tragedy is of the essence of scientific material- 
ism as at present understood. The lower and not 
the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last 
surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution 
which we can definitely see. Mr. Spencer believes 
this as much as any one; so why should he argue 
with us as if we were making silly sesthetic objec- 
tions to the "grossness" of "matter and motion," — 
the principles of his philosophy, — when what really 
dismays us in it is the disconsolateness of its ul- 
terior practical results? 

No, the true objection to materialism is not posi- 
tive but negative. It would be farcical at this day 
to make complaint of it for what it is, for "gross- 
ness." Grossness is what grossness does — we now 
know that. We make complaint of it, on the con- 
trary, for what it is not — not a permanent warrant 
for our more ideal interests, not a fulfiller of our 
remotest hopes. 

The notion of God, on the other hand, however 
inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical 
notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at 

422 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

least this practical superiority over them, that it 
guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently 
preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last 
word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then 
think of Him as still mindful of the old ideals and 
sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, 
where He is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, 
and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely 
final things. This need of an eternal moral order is 
one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those 
poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the 
conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the 
extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their 
verse. Here then, in these different emotional and 
practical appeals, in these adjustments of our con- 
crete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the 
delicate consequences which their differences entail, 
lie the real meanings of materialism and theism — 
not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's 
inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes 
of God. Materialism means simply the denial that 
the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ulti- 
mate hopes; theism means the affirmation of an 
eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. 
Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for any one 
who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will 
yield matter for serious philosophic debate. Con- 
cerning this question, at any rate, the positivists 
and pooh-pooh-ers of metaphysics are in the wrong. 
But possibly some of you may still rally to their 
defence. Even whilst admitting that theism and 

423 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1898] 

materialism make different prophecies of the world's 
future, you may yourselves pooh-pooh the difference 
as something so infinitely remote as to mean nothing 
for a sane mind. The essence of a sane mind, you 
may say, is to take shorter views, and to feel no 
concern about such chimseras as the latter end of 
the world. Well, I can only say that if you say 
this, you do injustice to human nature. Religious 
melancholy is not disposed of by a simple flourish of 
the word "insanity." The absolute things, the last 
things, the overlapping things, are the truly philo- 
sophic concern; all superior minds feel seriously 
about them, and the mind with the shortest views 
is simply the mind of the more shallow man. 

However, I am willing to pass over these very 
distant outlooks on the ultimate, if any of you so 
insist. The theistic controversy can still serve to 
illustrate the principle of pragmatism for us well 
enough, without driving us so far afield. If there 
be a God, it is not likely that he is confined solely 
to making differences in the world's latter end; he 
probably makes differences all along its course. 
Now the principle of practicalism says that the very 
meaning of the conception of God lies in those dif- 
ferences which must be made in our experience if 
the conception be true. God's famous inventory of 
perfections, as elaborated by dogmatic theology, 
either means nothing, says our principle, or it im- 
plies certain definite things that we can feel and do 
at particular moments of our lives, things which we 
could not feel and should not do were no God pres- 

424 



[1S9S] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

enr and were the business of the universe carried 
on by material atoms instead. So far as our con- 
: *| dona of the Deity involve no such experiences, so 
far they are meaningless and verbal. — scholastic 
entities and abstractions, as the positivists say. and 
fit objects for their scorn. But so far as they do 
involve such definite experiences. God means some- 
thing for us. and may be real. 

Now if we look at the definitions of God made by 
dogmatic theology, we see immediately that some 
stand and some fall when treated by this test. God. 
for example, as any orthodox text-book will tell us. 
is a being existing not only per se. or by himself, as 
created beings exist, but a se, or from himself : and 
out of this ••aseity" flow most of his perfections. He 
is. for example, necessary ; absolute : infinite in all 
respects; and single. He is simple, not com- 
pounded of essence and existence, substance and 
lent, actuality and potentiality, or subject and 
attributes, as are other things. He belongs to no 
genus : he is inwardly and outwardly unalterable ; he 
knows and wills all things, and first of all his own 
iufinite self, in one indivisible eternal act. And he 
is absolutely self-sufficing, and infinitely happy. 
Xow in which one of us practical Americans here 
assembled does this conglomeration of attributes 
awaken any sense of reality? And if in no one. then 
why not? Surely because such attributes awaken 
no responsive active feelings and call for no par- 
ticular conduct of our own. How does God's 
^aseity" come home to you? What specific thing 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS C 1898 J 

can I do to adapt myself to his "simplicity"? Or 
how determine our behavior henceforward if his 
"felicity" is anyhow absolutely complete?, In the 
'50's and '60's Captain Mayne Eeid was the great 
writer of boys' books of out-of-door adventure. He 
was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers 
of living animals' habits, and keeping up a fire of 
invective against the "closet-naturalists," as he 
called them, the collectors and classifiers, and han- 
dlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy I 
used to think that a closet-naturalist must be the 
vilest type of wretch under the sun. But surely the 
systematic theologians are the closet-naturalists of 
the Deity, even in Captain Mayne Beid's sense. 
Their orthodox deduction of God's attributes is 
nothing but a shuffling and matching of pedantic 
dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from 
human needs, something that might be worked out 
from the mere word "God" by a logical machine of 
wood and brass as well as by a man of flesh and 
blood. The attributes which I have quoted have 
absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion 
is a living practical affair. Other parts, indeed, of 
God's traditional description do have practical con- 
nection with life, and have owed all their historic 
importance to that fact. His omniscience, for 
example, and his justice. With the one he sees us 
in the dark, with the other he rewards and punishes 
what he sees. So do his ubiquity and eternity and 
unalterability appeal to our confidence, and his 
goodness banish our fears. Even attributes of less 

426 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

meaning to this present audience have in past times 
so appealed. One of the chief attributes of God, 
according to the orthodox theology, is his infinite 
love of himself, proved by asking the question, "By 
what but an infinite object can an infinite affection 
be appeased?" An immediate consequence of this 
primary self-love of God is the orthodox dogma that 
the manifestation of his own glory is God's primal 
purpose in creation; and that dogma has certainly 
made very efficient practical connection with life. 
It is true that we ourselves are tending to outgrow 
this old monarchical conception of a Deity with his 
"court" and pomp — "his state is kingly, thousands 
at his bidding speed," etc. — but there is no denying 
the enormous influence it has had over ecclesiastical 
history, nor, by repercussion, over the history of 
European states. And yet even these more real and 
significant attributes have the trail of the serpent 
over them as the books on theology have actually 
worked them out. One feels that, in the theolo- 
gians' hands, they are only a set of dictionary- 
adjectives, mechanically deduced ; logic has stepped 
into the place of vision, professionalism into that of 
life. Instead of bread we get a stone; instead of 
a fish, a serpent. Did such a conglomeration of ab- 
stract general terms give really the gist of our 
knowledge of the Deity, divinity-schools might in- 
deed continue to flourish, but religion, vital religion, 
would have taken its flight from this world. What 
keeps religion going is something else than abstract 
definitions and systems of logically concatenated 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 189 8] 

adjectives, and something different from faculties 
of theology and their professors. All these things 
are after-effects, secondary accretions upon a mass 
of concrete religious experiences, connecting them- 
selves with feeling and conduct that renew them- 
selves in scecula sceculorum in the lives of humble 
private men. If you ask what these experiences are, 
they are conversations with the unseen, voices and 
visions, responses to prayer, changes of heart, deliv- 
erances from fear, inflowings of help, assurances of 
support, whenever certain persons set their own 
internal attitude in certain appropriate ways. The 
power comes and goes and is lost, and can be found 
only in a certain definite direction, just as if it were 
a concrete material thing. These direct experiences 
of a wider spiritual life with which our superficial 
consciousness is continuous, and with which it keeps 
up an intense commerce, form the primary mass of 
direct religious experience on which all hearsay 
religion rests, and which furnishes that notion of 
an ever-present God, out of which systematic theol- 
ogy thereupon proceeds to make capital in its own 
unreal pedantic way. What the word "God" 
means is just those passive and active experiences 
of your life. Now, my friends, it is quite imma- 
terial to my purpose whether you yourselves enjoy 
and venerate these experiences, or whether you 
stand aloof and, viewing them in others, suspect 
them of being illusory and vain. Like all other 
human experiences, they too certainly share in the 
general liability to illusion and mistake. They 

428 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

need not be infallible. But they are certainly the 
originals of the God-idea, and theology is the trans- 
lation ; and you remember that I am now using the 
God-idea merely as an example, not to discuss as to 
its truth or error, but only to show how well the 
principle of pragmatism works. That the God of 
systematic theology should exist or not exist is a 
matter of small practical moment. At most it 
means that you may continue uttering certain ab- 
stract words and that you must stop using others. 
But if the God of these particular experiences be 
false, it is an awful thing for you, if you are one of 
those whose lives are stayed on such experiences. 
The theistic controversy, trivial enough if we take 
it merely academically and theologically, is of tre- 
mendous significance if we test it by its results for 
actual life. 

I can best continue to recommend the principle of 
practicalism to you by keeping in the neighborhood 
of this theological idea. I reminded you a few 
minutes ago that the old monarchical notion of the 
Deity as a sort of Louis the Fourteenth of the 
Heavens is losing nowadays much of its ancient 
prestige. Religious philosophy, like all philosophy, 
is growing more and more idealistic. And in the 
philosophy of the Absolute, so called, that post- 
Kantian form of idealism which is carrying so many 
of our higher minds before it, we have the triumph 
of what in old times was summarily disposed of as 
the pantheistic heresy, — I mean the conception of 
God, not as the extraneous creator, but as the in- 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1898 3 

dwelling spirit and substance of the world. I know 
not where one can find a more candid, more clear, 
or, on the whole, more persuasive statement of this 
theology of Absolute Idealism than in the addresses 
made before this very Union three years ago by your 
own great Calif ornian philosopher (whose colleague 
at Harvard I am proud to be), Josiah Koyce. His 
contributions to the resulting volume, The Concep- 
tion of God, form a very masterpiece of populariza- 
tion. Now you will remember, many of you, that 
in the discussion that followed Professor Koyce's 
first address, the debate turned largely on the ideas 
of unity and plurality, and on the question whether, 
if God be One in All and All in All, "One with the 
unity of a single instant," as Koyce calls it, "form- 
ing in His wholeness one luminously transparent 
moment," any room is left for real morality or free- 
dom. Professor Howison, in particular, was earnest 
in urging that morality and freedom are relations 
between a manifold of selves, and that under the 
regime of Koyce's monistic Absolute Thought "no 
true manifold of selves is or can be provided for." 
I will not go into any of the details of that particu- 
lar discussion, but just ask you to consider for a 
moment whether, in general, any discussion about 
monism or pluralism, any argument over the unity of 
the universe, would not necessarily be brought into 
a shape where it tends to straighten itself out, by 
bringing our principle of practical results to bear. 
The question whether the world is at bottom One 
or Many is a typical metaphysical question. Long 

430 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

has it raged ! In its crudest form it is an exquisite 
example of the loggerheads of metaphysics. "I say 
it is one great fact," Parmenides and Spinoza ex- 
claim. "I say it is many little facts/' reply the 
atomists and associationists. "I say it is both one 
and many, many in one/' say the Hegelians ; and in 
the ordinary popular discussions we rarely get be- 
yond this barren reiteration by the disputants of 
their pet adjectives of number. But is it not first 
of all clear that when we take such an adjective as 
"One" absolutely and abstractly, its meaning is so 
vague and empty that it makes no difference whether 
we affirm or deny it? Certainly this universe is 
not the mere number One ; and yet you can number 
it "one," if you like, in talking about it as contrasted 
with other possible worlds numbered "two" and 
"three" for the occasion. What exact thing do you 
practically mean by "One," when you call the uni- 
verse One, is the first question you must ask. In 
what ways does the oneness come home to your own 
personal life? By what difference does it express 
itself in your experience? How can you act dif- 
ferently towards a universe which is one? Inquired 
into in this way, the unity might grow clear and be 
affirmed in some ways and denied in others, and so 
cleared up, even though a certain vague and wor- 
shipful portentousness might disappear from the 
notion of it in the process. 

For instance, one practical result that follows 
when we have one thing to handle, is that we can 
pass from one part of it to another without letting 

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COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1898 l 

go of the thing. In this sense oneness must be 
partly denied and partly affirmed of our universe. 
Physically we can pass continuously in various man- 
ners from one part of it to another part. But log- 
ically and psychically the passage seems less easy, 
for there is no obvious transition from one mind to 
another, or from minds to physical things. You 
have to step off and get on again; so that in these 
ways the world is not one, as measured by that prac- 
tical test. 

Another practical meaning of oneness is suscep- 
tibility of collection. A collection is one, though the 
things that compose it be many. Now, can we 
practically "collect" the universe? Physically, of 
course we cannot. And mentally we cannot, if we 
take it concretely in its details. But if we take it 
summarily and abstractly, then we collect it men- 
tally whenever we refer to it, even as I do now when 
I fling the term "universe" at it, and so seem to 
leave a mental ring around it. It is plain, how- 
ever, that such abstract noetic unity (as one might 
call it) is practically an extremely insignificant 
thing. 

Again, oneness may mean generic sameness, so 
that you can treat all parts of the collection by one 
rule and get the same results. It is evident that 
in this sense the oneness of our world is incomplete, 
for in spite of much generic sameness in its elements 
and items, they still remain of many irreducible 
kinds. You can't pass by mere logic all over the 
field of it. 

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[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

Its elements have, however, an affinity or com- 
mensurability with each other, are not wholly irrele- 
vant, but can be compared, and fit together after 
certain fashions. This again might practically 
mean that they were one in origin, and that, trac- 
ing them backwards, we should find them arising 
in a single primal causal fact. Such unity of origin 
would have definite practical consequences, would 
have them for our scientific life at least. 

I can give only these hasty superficial indications 
of what I mean when I say that it tends to clear 
up the quarrel between monism and pluralism to 
subject the notion of unity to such practical tests. 
On the other hand, it does but perpetuate strife and 
misunderstanding to continue talking of it in an ab- 
solute and mystical way. I have little doubt my- 
self that this old quarrel might be completely 
smoothed out to the satisfaction of all claimants, 
if only the maxim of Peirce were methodically fol- 
lowed here. The current monism on the whole still 
keeps talking in too abstract a way. It says the 
world must be either pure disconnectedness, no 
universe at all, or absolute unity. It insists that 
there is no stopping-place half way. Any connec- 
tion whatever, says this monism, is only possible 
if there be still more connection, until at last we are 
driven to admit the absolutely total connection re- 
quired. But this absolutely total connection either 
means nothing, is the mere word "one" spelt long ; or 
else it means the sum of all the partial connections 
that can possibly be conceived. I believe that when 

433 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 18 ^ 

we thus attack the question, and set ourselves to 
search for these possible connections, and conceive 
each in a definite practical way, the dispute is 
already in a fair way to be settled beyond the 
chance of misunderstanding, by a compromise in 
which the Many and the One both get their lawful 
rights. 

But I am in danger of becoming technical; so I 
must stop right here, and let you go. 

I am happy to say that it is the English-speaking 
philosophers who first introduced the custom of in- 
terpreting the meaning of conceptions by asking 
what difference they make for life. Mr. Peirce has 
only expressed in the form of an explicit maxim 
what their sense for reality led them all instinc- 
tively to do. The great English way of investigat- 
ing a conception is to ask yourself right off, "What 
is it known as? In what facts does it result? 
What is its cash-value, in terms of particular ex- 
perience? and what special difference would come 
into the world according as it were true or false?" 
Thus does Locke treat the conception of personal 
identity. What you mean by it is just your chain 
of memories, says he. That is the only concretely 
verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas 
about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the 
spiritual substance on which it is based, are there- 
fore void of intelligible meaning ; and propositions 
touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed 
or denied. So Berkeley with his "matter." The 
cash-value of matter is our physical sensations. 

434 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

That is what it is known as, all that we concretely 
verify of its conception. That therefore is the 
whole meaning of the word "matter" — any other 
pretended meaning is mere wind of words. Hnme 
does the same thing with causation. It is known 
as habitual antecedence, and tendency on our part 
to look for something definite to come. Apart from 
this practical meaning it has no significance what- 
ever, and books about it may be committed to the 
flames, says Hume. Stewart and Brown, James 
Mill, John Mill, and Bain, have followed more or 
less consistently the same method; and Shadworth 
Hodgson has used it almost as explicitly as Mr. 
Peirce. These writers have many of them no doubt 
been too sweeping in their negations ; Hume, in par- 
ticular, and James Mill, and Bain. But when all is 
said and done, it was they, not Kant, who intro- 
duced "the critical method" into philosophy, the 
one method fitted to make philosophy a study 
worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can 
possibly remain in debating philosophic proposi- 
tions that will never make an appreciable difference 
to us in action? And what matters it, when all 
propositions are practically meaningless, which of 
them be called true or false? 

The shortcomings and the negations and bald- 
nesses of the English philosophers in question come, 
not from their eye to merely practical results, but 
solely from their failure to track the practical re- 
sults completely enough to see how far they extend. 
Hume can be corrected and built out, and his beliefs 

435 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1898 3 

enriched, by using Humian principles exclusively, 
and without making any use of the circuitous and 
ponderous artificialities of Kant. It is indeed a some- 
what pathetic matter, as it seems to me, that this is 
not the course which the actual history of phil- 
osophy has followed. Hume had no English suc- 
cessors of adequate ability to complete him and cor- 
rect his negations; so it happened, as a matter of 
fact, that the building out of critical philosophy has 
mainly been left to thinkers who were under the 
influence of Kant. Even in England and this coun- 
try it is with Kantian catch-words and categories 
that the fuller view of life is pursued, and in our 
universities it is the courses in transcendentalism 
that kindle the enthusiasm of the more ardent 
students, whilst the courses in English philosophy 
are committed to a secondary place. I cannot think 
that this is exactly as it should be. And I say this 
not out of national jingoism, for jingoism has no 
place in philosophy; or out of excitement over the 
great Anglo-American alliance against the world, 
of which we nowadays hear so much — though 
heaven knows that to that alliance I wish a God- 
speed. I say it because I sincerely believe that the 
English spirit in philosophy is intellectually, as 
well as practically and morally, on the saner, 
sounder, and truer path. Kant's mind is the rarest 
and most intricate of all possible antique bric-a-brac 
museums, and connoisseurs and dilettanti will al- 
ways wish to visit it and see the wondrous and racy 
contents. The temper of the dear old man about his 

436 



[1898] PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS 

work is perfectly delectable. And yet lie is really — 
although I shrink with some terror from saying 
such a thing before some of you here present — at 
bottom a mere curio, a "specimen." I mean by this 
a perfectly definite thing: I believe that Kant be- 
queaths to us not one single conception which is 
both indispensable to philosophy and which phil- 
osophy either did not possess before him, or was not 
destined inevitably to acquire after him through 
the growth of men's reflection upon the hypotheses 
by which science interprets nature. The true line 
of philosophic progress lies, in short, it seems to me, 
not so much through Kant as round him to the point 
where now we stand. Philosophy can perfectly well 
outflank him, and build herself up into adequate 
fulness by prolonging more directly the older Eng- 
lish lines. 

May I hope, as I now conclude, and release your 
attention from the strain to which you have so 
kindly put it on my behalf, that on this wonderful 
Pacific Coast, of which our race is taking posses- 
sion, the principle of practicalism, in which I have 
tried so hard to interest you, and with it the whole 
English tradition in philosophy, will come to its 
rights, and in your hands help the rest of us in our 
struggle towards the light. 



437 



XXIX 

HODGSON'S "OBSEBVATIONS OF 
TKANCE" 1 

[1898] 

If I may be allowed a personal expression of 
opinion at the end of this notice, I would say that 
the Piper phenomena are the most absolutely baffling 
thing I know. Of the various applicable hypotheses, 
each seems more unnatural than the rest. Any 
definitely known form of fraud seems out of the 
question; yet undoubtedly, could it be made prob- 
able, fraud would be by far the most satisfying ex- 
planation, since it would leave no further problems 
outstanding. The spirit-hypothesis exhibits a va- 
il 1 Closing paragraphs reprinted from a review of R. Hodg- 
son's A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of 
Trance, Psychological Review, 1898, 5, 420-424. This selection and 
the one reprinted below (p. 484) represent James's most mature 
views of mediumistic phenomena, with special reference to the 
case of Mrs. Piper. A popular presentation of these views may 
be found in "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher," reprinted 
in Memories and Studies (1911). The author's earlier views can 
be traced through the following articles and reviews: (1) "Re- 
port of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena," Proceed- 
ings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1886, 1, 
102-106, containing a report on "Mrs. P.," and a statement of 
the writer's belief that the general low level of mediumistic 
evidence requires the very careful study of special test cases; 
(2) "A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of 

438 



[1898] HODGSON'S "OBSEBVATIONS" 

cancy, triviality and incoherence of mind painful to 
think of as the state of the departed; and coupled 
therewithal a pretension to impress one, a disposi- 
tion to "fish" and face round, and disguise the es- 
sential hollowness, which are, if anything, more 
painful still. Mr. Hodgson has to resort to the 
theory that, although the communicants probably 
are spirits, they are in a semi-comatose or sleeping 
state while communicating, and only half aware of 
what is going on, while the habits of Mrs. Piper's 
neural organism largely supply the definite form of 
words, etc., in which the phenomenon is clothed. 
Then there is the theory that the "subliminal" ex- 
tension of Mrs. Piper's own mind masquerades in 
this way, and plays these fantastic tricks before 
high heaven, using its preternatural powers of cog- 
nition and memory for the basest of deceits. Many 
details make for this view, which also falls well into 
line with what we know of automatic writing and 

Trance," Part III., Proceedings of the [English] Society for 
Psychical Research, 1890, 6, 651-659, containing story of the 
author's experiences with Mrs. Piper since his first acquain- 
tance with her in 1885, expressing belief that her trance knowl- 
edge exceeds her waking knowledge, but offering no explana- 
tion; (3) "Address of the President," Proceedings of the [Eng- 
lish] Society for Psychical Research, 1896, 12, 2-10, reprinted in 
part in Will to Believe (1907), pp. 317-320, 323-327, asserting 
author's belief that the Piper case is decisive against the ortho- 
dox psychology: (4) "Psychical Research," Psychological Re- 
view, 1896, 3, 649-652; (5) "Mrs. Piper 'The Medium,' " Science, 
1898, N.S. 7, 640-641, containing controversy with Prof. J. McK. 
Cattell on the evidential value of the Piper case. For the many 
additional titles relating to psychical research in the broad 
sense, the reader should consult The Annotated Bibliography 
of the Writings of William James (1920). Ed.] 

439 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS f 1898 l 

similar subliminal performances in the public at 
large. But what a ghastly and grotesque sort of 
appendage to one's personality is this, from any 
point of view: the humbugging and masquerading 
extra-marginal self is as great a paradox for psy- 
chology as the comatose spirits are for pneumatol- 
ogy. Finally, we may fall back on the notion of a 
sort of floating mind-stuff in the world, inf rahuman, 
yet possessed of fragmentary gleams of superhuman 
cognition, unable to gather itself together except by 
taking advantage of the trance states of some exist- 
ing human organism, and there enjoying a parasitic 
existence which it prolongs by making itself accept- 
able and plausible under the improvised name of 
"spirit control. " On any of these theories our 
"classic" human life, as we may call it, seems to con- 
nect itself with an environment so "romantic" as 
to baffle all one's habitual sense of teleology and 
moral meaning. And yet there seems no refuge for 
one really familiar with the Piper phenomenon (or, 
doubtless, with others that are similar) from admit- 
ting one or other, perhaps even all of these fantastic 
prolongations of mental life into the unknown. 

The world is evidently more complex than we are 
accustomed to think it, the "absolute world-ground," 
in particular, being farther off (as Mr. F. C. S. 
Schiller has well pointed out) than it is the wont 
either of the usual empiricisms or of the usual ideal- 
isms to think it. This being the case, the "scien- 
tific" sort of procedure is evidently Mr. Hodgson's, 
with his dogged and candid exploration of all the 

440 



[1898] HODGSON'S "OBSERVATIONS" 

details of so exceptional a concrete instance; and 
not that of the critics who, refusing to come to any 
close quarters with the facts, survey them at long 
range and summarily dispose of them at a conven- 
ient distance by the abstract name of fraud. 



441 



XXX 

"PEKSOSTAL IDEALISM" x 

[1903] 

... I call [this] book refreshing, first, because 
"band-work/' always a cheerful sight, is peculiarly 
so in a field like that of philosophy where men are 
usually more given to stickling for their differences 
than for their points of union; second, because the 
style of most of the essayists is unconventional and 
enthusiastic — sometimes frolicsome even ; and finally 
because the philosophy which the writers profess is 
a sort of breaking of the ice, and seems to promise a 
new channel where formerly the only pathways 
were Naturalism's desert on the one hand, and the 
barren summits of the Absolute on the other. Here 
we have Naturalism's concreteness without its low- 
ness, and Absolutism's elevation without its ab- 
stractness, for human purposes, of result. The 
human person, according to these writers, shows 
itself, if we take it completely and empirically 
enough, to be a force irreducible to lower terms, and 

I 1 Reprinted with omissions from Mind, 1903, N.S. 12, 93-97. 
Review of Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight 
Members of the University of Oxford, edited by Henry Sturt, 
1902. The authors were F. C. S. Schiller, G. F. Stout, W. R. 
Boyce Gibson, G. E. Underhill, R. R. Marett, H. Sturt, F. W. 
Russell, and Hastings Rashdall. On same topic see below, p. 
450. Ed.] 

442 



[1903] "PERSONAL IDEALISM" 

an origin both of theoretic perspectives and of con- 
sequences in the way of outward fact. 

A re-anthropomorphised Universe is the general 
outcome of this philosophy, which on the whole 
continues Lotze, Sigwart, and Renouvier's line of 
thinking, although it is so much more radically ex- 
periential in tone. Being so experiential, it has to 
be unacademic, informal, and fragmentary; and 
this, from the point of view of making converts, is a 
bad practical defect. What we need now in Eng- 
lish, it seems to me, is a more commanding and all- 
round statement in classic style and generalised 
terms of the personal idealism which these authors 
represent. Mr. Schiller might compass it, if he 
would tone down a little the exuberance of his 
polemic wit — meanwhile we have these trial bricks, 
set in at separate points. 

I add no criticism — although I think that every 
essay calls for some objection of detail — because I 
think that the important thing to recognise is that 
we have here a distinct new departure in contem- 
porary thought, the combination, namely, of a teleo- 
logical and spiritual inspiration with the same kind 
of conviction that the particulars of experience con- 
stitute the stronghold of reality as has usually 
characterised the materialistic type of mind. If 
empiricism is to be radical it must indeed admit 
the concrete data of experience in their full com- 
pleteness. The only fully complete concrete data 

443 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 19 ^] 

are, however, the successive moments of our own 
several histories, taken with their subjective per- 
sonal aspect, as well as with their "objective" deliv- 
erance or "content." After the analogy of these 
moments of experiences must all complete reality 
be conceived. Radical empiricism thus leads to the 
assumption of a collectivism of personal lives 
(which may be of any grade of complication, and 
superhuman or infrahuman as well as human) , vari- 
ously cognitive of each other, variously conative and 
impulsive, genuinely evolving and changing by 
effort and trial, and by their interaction and cumu- 
lative achievements making up the world. Be- 
ginnings of a sincere Empirical Evolutionism like 
this have been made already — I need only point to 
Fechner, Lotze, Paulsen, C. S. Peirce (in the 
Monist), and to a certain extent to Wundt and 
Royce. But most of these authors spoil the scheme 
entirely by the arbitrary way in which they clap 
on to it an absolute monism with which it has noth- 
ing to do. Mr. Schiller, in his Riddles of the 
Sphinx, and more acutely still in various essays, has 
given to it a more consistent form. It is to be hoped 
that the publication of the present volume will 
give it a more mature self -consciousness, and that 
a systematic all-round statement of it may erelong 
appear. I know of no more urgent philosophic 
desideratum at the present day. 



444 



XXXI 

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 1 

[1904] 

The rest of the world has made merry over the Chi- 
cago man's legendary saying that "Chicago hasn't 
had time to get round to culture yet, but when she 
does strike her, she'll make her hum." Already the 
prophecy is fulfilling itself in a dazzling manner. 
Chicago has a School of Thought! — a school of 
thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in 
literature as the School of Chicago for twenty-five 
years to come. Some universities have plenty of 
thought to show, but no school; others plenty of 
school, but no thought. The University of Chicago, 
by its Decennial Publications, shows real thought 
and a real school. Prof. John Dewey, and at least 
ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the 
world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many 

*]L Studies in Logical Theory, John Dewey, with the co- 
operation of members and fellows of the Department of Philos- 
ophy. The Decennial Publications, Second Series, Volume XI., 
Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, 1903. 2. The Defi- 
nition of the Psychical, George H. Mead. 3. Existence, Meaning 
and Reality, A. W. Moore. 4. Logical Conditions of a Scientific 
Treatment of Morality, John Dewey. 5. The Relations of 
Structural and Functional Psychology to Philosophy, James 
Rowland Angell. Reprints from Volume III. of the first series 
of Decennial Publications, ibid., 1903. [Review reprinted with 
omissions from Psychological Bulletin, 1904, 1, 1-5. Ed.] 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS [1904] 

co-operating minds, of a view of the world, both 
theoretical and practical, which is so simple, mas- 
sive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many 
parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves 
the title of a new system of philosophy. If it be as 
true as it is original, its publication must be reck- 
oned an important event. The present reviewer, 
for one, strongly suspects it of being true. 

There are two great gaps in the system, which 
none of the Chicago writers have done anything to 
fill, and until they are filled, the system, as a sys- 
tem, will appear defective. There is no cosmology, 
no positive account of the order of physical fact, 
as contrasted with mental fact, and no account of 
the fact (which I assume the writers to believe in) 
that different subjects share a common object-world. 
These lacunse can hardly be inadvertent — we shall 
doubtless soon see them filled in some way by one 
or another member of the school. 

I might go into much greater technical detail, and 
I might in particular make many a striking quota- 
tion. But I prefer to be exceedingly summary, and 
merely to call the reader's attention to the impor- 
tance of this output of Chicago University. Tak- 
ing it en gros, what strikes me most in it is the 
great sense of concrete reality with which it is filled. 
It seems a promising via media between the empiri- 
cist and transcendentalist tendencies of our time. 
Like empiricism, it is individualistic and phenome- 
nalistic ; it places truth in rebus, and not ante rem. 

446 



[1904] THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 

It resembles transcendentalism, on the other hand, 
in making value and fact inseparable, and in stand- 
ing for continuities and purposes in things. It em- 
ploys the genetic method to which both schools are 
now accustomed. It coincides remarkably with the 
simultaneous movement in favor of "pragmatism" 
or "humanism" set up quite independently at Ox- 
ford by Messrs. Schiller and Sturt. It probably has 
a great future, and is certainly something of which 
Americans may be proud. Professor Dewey ought 
to gather into another volume his scattered essays 
and addresses on psychological and ethical topics, 
for now that his philosophy is systematically formu- 
lated, these throw a needed light. 



447 



XXXII 

HUMANISM 1 

[1904] 

Quite recently the word "pragmatism/' first used 
thirty years ago by our American philosopher C. S. 
Peirce, has become fashionable as the designation of 
a novel way of looking at the mind's relations to 
reality. Throughout almost the entire past both 
Science and Philosophy have been accustomed to 
suppose that "Truth" must needs consist of a hard- 
and-fast system of propositions, valid in themselves 
and eternally, which our minds have only to copy 
literally. Logic and mathematics had always 
seemed to constitute such systems, and the entities 
and laws of physics and chemistry, just as our text- 
books formulated them, were supposed to be equally 
"objective." 

But three influences have at last conspired to dis- 
solve away this appearance of absoluteness in such 
facts and truths as we can formulate. First, philo- 
sophic criticisms like those of Mill, Lotze, and Sig- 
wart have emphasized the incongruence of the 
forms of our thinking with the "things" which the 

I 1 Reprinted with omissions from Nation, 1904, 78, 175-176. 
Review of Humanism: Philosophical Essays, by F. 0. S. Schiller, 
1903. Cf. also above, pp. 442-444. Ed.] 

448 



f 1904 3 HUMANISM 

thinking never u'«elt ss sa< cessf ally handles. (Predi- 
cates and subjects, for example, do not live sepa- 
rately in the things, as they do in our judgments of 
them.) Second, not only has the doctrine of Evo- 
lution weaned us from fixities and inflexibilities in 
general, and given us a world all plastic, but it has 
made us ready to imagine almost all our functions, 
even the intellectual ones, as "adaptations," and 
possibly transient adaptations, to practical human 
needs. Lastly, the enormous growth of the sciences 
in the past fifty years has reconciled us to the idea 
that "Not quite true" is as near as we can ever get. 
For investigating minds there is no sanctity in any 
theory, and "laws of nature" absolutely expressible 
by us are idols of the popular-science level of educa- 
tion exclusively. Up-to-date logicians, mathemati- 
cians, physicists, and chemists vie with one another 
as to who will break down most barriers, efface most 
outlines, supersede most current definitions and 
conceptions, and show most skill in playing about 
the old material in new ways, limited only by the 
one rule of the game, that the new thoughts must 
dip into and coalesce with the material at more than 
one point of sensible experience. 

Thus has arisen the pragmatism of Pearson in 
England, of Mach in Austria, and of the somewhat 
more reluctant Poincare in France, all of whom say 
that our sciences are but Denkmittel — "true" in no 
other sense than that of yielding a conceptual short- 
hand, economical for our descriptions. Thus does 
Simmel in Berlin suggest that no human conception 

449 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 19 <>4] 

whatever is more than an instrument of biological 
utility ; and that if it be successfully that, we may 
call it true, whatever it resembles or fails to re- 
semble. Bergson, and more particularly his dis- 
ciples Wilbois, Le Roy, and others in France, have 
defended a very similar doctrine. Ostwald in Leip- 
zig, with his Energetics, belongs to the same school, 
which has received the most thoroughgoingly phil- 
osophical of its expressions here in America, in the 
publications of Professor Dewey and his pupils in 
Chicago University, publications of which the vol- 
ume Studies in Logical Theory (1903) forms only 
the most systematized instalment. 1 

Last year the volume Personal Idealism/ a collec- 
tion of essays by Messrs. Sturt, Schiller, and other 
Oxford teachers, announced the pragmatist doctrine 
radically to English academic circles ; and now Mr. 
Schiller publishes his own scattered essays to the 
same effect, dropping the term "pragmatism" al- 
together, and boldly describing as "Humanism" the 
philosophy of which he is so far the most vivacious 
and pugnacious champion. No one can ever foresee 
what terms will succeed in the struggle to gain cur- 
rency. "Pragmatism" (i.e., practicalism) is cer- 
tainly somewhat blind. "Humanism" is perhaps 
too "whole-hearted" for the use of philosophers, who 
are a bloodless breed; but, save for that objection, 
one might back it, for it expresses the essence of the 
new way of thought, which is, that it is impossible 

C 1 Cf. also above, pp. 445-447. Ed.] 
[ 2 Cf. above, pp. 442-444. Ed.] 

450 



£ 1904 3 HUMANISM 

to strip the human element out from even our most 
abstract theorizing. All our mental categories 
without exception have been evolved because of 
their fruitfulness for life, and owe their being to 
historic circumstances, just as much as do the nouns 
and verbs and adjectives in which our languages 
clothe them. 

But humanistic empiricism will have many other 
steps forward to make before it conquers all antago- 
nisms. Grant, for example, that our human sub- 
jectivity determines what we shall say things are; 
grant that it gives the "predicates" to all the "sub- 
jects" of our conversation. Still the fact remains 
that some subjects are there for us to talk about, 
and others not there; and the farther fact that, in 
spite of so many different ways in which we may 
perform the talking, there still is a grain in the 
subjects which we can't well go against, a cleavage- 
structure which resists certain of our predicates 
and makes others slide in more easily. Does not 
this stubborn that of some things and not of others ; 
does not this imperfect plasticity of them to our 
conceptual manipulation, oppose a positive limit to 
the sphere of influence of humanistic explanations? 
Does not the fact that so many of our thoughts are 
retroactive in their application point to a similar 
limit? "Kadium," for example; humanistically, 
both the that and the what of it are creations of 
yesterday. But we believe that ultra-humanistically 
they existed ages before their gifted discoverers 

451 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS C 1904 ] 

were born. In what shape? There's the rub ! for we 
have no non-humanistic categories to think in. But 
the that of things, and their affinity with some of 
our whats and not with others, and the retroactive 
force of our conceptions, are so many problems for 
Humanism over which battle is sure to rage for a 
long time to come. 

Mr. Schiller has but skirted some of these prob- 
lems without entering into them deeply. But he has 
gone profoundly into others, and his style is as clean 
and clear and lively English, as his thought is 
strong and original. His ideas are sure to form the 
storm-centre for the philosophy of at least the next 
decade. . . . 



452 



XXXIII 
LAUKA BKIDGMAN x 

[1904] 

The world changes, and the minds of men. Helen 
Keller outstrips Laura Bridgman, as Rudyard Kip- 
ling outstrips Maria Edgeworth. Will Helen her- 
self appear quaint and old-fashioned fifty years 
hence, to a generation spoiled by some still more 
daring recipient of its sympathy and wonder? We 
can answer such a question as little as Dr. Howe 
could have answered it fifty years ago; for the 
high-water mark of one age in every line of its 
prowess always seems "the limit," — at any rate the 
only limit positively imaginable to those who are 
living, — and just what form and what direction 
Evolution will strike into when she takes her next 
step into novelty is ever a secret till the step is 
made. 

Laura was the limit in her day. The child of 
seven was dumb and blind and almost without the 
sense of smell, with no plaything but an old boot 
which served for a doll, and with so little education 
in affection that she had never been taught to kiss. 

1 Laura Bridgman. Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and what He 
taught Her. By Maud Howe and Florence Howe Hall. Boston : 
Little, Brown & Co. 1903. [Reprinted with omissions from 
Atlantic Monthly, January, 1904, 93, 95-98. Ed.] 

453 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1904] 

She was sternly handled at home, and was irascible 
and an object of fear and pity to all but one of the 
village neighbors, and that one was half-witted. 
The way in which she became in a few years, 
through Dr. Howe's devotion, an educated girl, 
delicate-mannered, spiritual-minded, and sweet- 
tempered, seemed such a miracle of philanthropic 
achievement that the fame of it spread not only over 
our country, but throughout Europe. It was re- 
garded as a work of edification, a missionary feat. 
The Sunday-schools all heard of Laura as a soul 
buried alive but disentombed and brought into 
God's sunlight by science and religion working hand 
in hand. The few other blind deaf-mutes on whom 
attempts at rescue had been made — Oliver Caswell, 
Julia Brace, and others — were so inferior that 
Laura's decidedly attenuated personality stood for 
the extreme of richness attainable by humanity 
when its experience was limited to the sense of 
touch alone. Of such all-sided ambitions and curi- 
osities, of such untrammelled soarings and skim- 
mings over the fields of language, of such complete- 
ness of memory and easy mastery of realities as 
Helen Keller has shown us, no one then had a 
dream. 

It is now indeed the age of Kipling versus that 
of Edgeworth. Laura was primarily regarded as a 
phenomenon of conscience, almost a theological 
phenomenon. Helen is primarily a phenomenon of 
vital exuberance. Life for her is a series of ad- 
ventures, rushed at with enthusiasm and fun. For 

454 



[1904] LAURA BRIDGMAN 

Laura it was more like a series of such careful in- 
door steps as a convalescent makes when the bed 
days are over. Helen's age is that of the scarehead 
and portrait bespattered newspaper. In Laura's 
time the papers were featureless, and the public 
found as much zest in exhibitions at institutions for 
the deaf and dumb as it now finds in football games. 
In contrast with the recklessly sensational terms 
in which everything nowadays expresses itself, there 
seems a sort of white veil of primness spread over 
this whole biography of Laura. All those who 
figure in it bear the stamp of conscience. Dr. Howe 
himself took his educative task religiously. It was 
his idea, as it was that of all the American liberals 
of his generation, that the soul has intuitive re- 
ligious faculties which life will awaken, indepen- 
dently of revelation. Laura's nature was intensely 
moral, — almost morbidly so, in fact, — and assimi- 
lated the conception of a Divine Ruler with great 
facility; but it does not appear certain that such 
an idea would have come to her spontaneously. 
She was easily converted into revivalistic evangeli- 
cism at the age of thirty-three, through communica- 
tions which her biographers deplore as having per- 
verted her originally optimistic faith. Her spir- 
itual accomplishments seem to have been regarded 
rather as matters for wonder by the public of her 
day. But, granted a nature with a bent in the spir- 
itual direction, it is hard to imagine conditions more 
favorable to its development than Laura's. Her im- 
mediate life, once it was redeemed (as Dr. Howe re- 

455 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1904 1 

deemed it) from quasi-animality, was almost wholly 
one of conduct toward other people. Her relations 
to "things," only tactile at best, were for the most 
part remote and hearsay and symbolic. Personal 
relations had to be her foreground, — she had to 
think in terms almost exclusively social and spir- 
itual. 

There are endless interesting traits, some of them 
humanly touching, some of them priceless to the psy- 
chologist, scattered through this life of Laura. The 
question immediately suggests itself, Why was 
Laura so superior to other deaf-mutes, and why is 
Helen Keller so superior to Laura? Since Galton 
first drew attention to the subject, every one knows 
that in some of us the material of thought is mainly 
optical, in others auditory, etc., and the classifica- 
tion of human beings into the eye-minded, the 
ear-minded, and the motor-minded, is familiar. 
Of course if a person is born to be eye-minded, 
blindness will maim his life far more than if 
he is ear-minded originally. If ear-minded, deaf- 
ness will maim him most. If he be natively con- 
structed on a touch-minded or motor-minded plan, 
he will lose less than the others from either blind- 
ness or deafness. Touch-images and motor-images 
are the only terms that subjects "congenitally" 
blind and deaf can think in. It may be that Laura 
and Helen were originally meant to be more "tac- 
tile" and "motile" than their less successful rivals 
in the race for education, and that Helen, being 

456 



[1904] LAURA BRIDGMAN 

more exclusively motor-minded than any subject yet 
met with, is the one least crippled by the loss of 
her other senses. 

But such comparisons are vague conjectures. 
What is not conjecture, but fact, is the philosophical 
conclusion which we are forced to draw from the 
cases both of Laura and of Helen. Their entire 
thinking goes on in tactile and motor symbols. Of 
the glories of the world of light and sound they have 
no inkling. Their thought is confined to the pallid- 
est verbal substitutes for the realities which are its 
object. The mental material of which it consists 
would be considered by the rest of us to be of the 
deadliest insipidity. Nevertheless, life is full of 
absorbing interest to each of them, and in Helen's 
case thought is free and abundant in quite excep- 
tional measure. What clearer proof could we ask 
of the fact that the relations among things, far more 
than the things themselves, are what is intellectu- 
ally interesting, and that it makes little difference 
what terms we think in, so long as the relations 
maintain their character. All sorts of terms can 
transport the mind with equal delight, provided 
they be woven into equally massive and far-reaching 
schemes and systems of relationship. They are then 
equivalent for intellectual purposes, and for yield- 
ing intellectual pleasure, for the schemes and sys- 
tems are what the mind finds interesting. 

Laura's life should find a place in every library. 
Dr. Howe's daughters have executed it with tact 
and feeling. No reader can fail to catch some- 

457 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 190 « 

thing of Laura's own touching reverence for the 
noble figure of "the Doctor." And if the ruddier 
pages which record Helen's exploits make the good 
Laura's image seem just a little anaemic by contrast, 
we cannot forget that there never could have been 
a Helen Keller if there had not been a Laura 
Bridgman. 



458 



XXXIY 

G. PAPINI AND THE PRAGMATIST 
MOVEMENT IN ITALY x 

[1906] 

American students have so long had the habit of 
turning to Germany for their philosophic inspira- 
tion, that they are only beginning to recognize the 
splendid psychological and philosophical activity 
with which France to-day is animated; and as for 
poor little Italy, few of them think it necessary 
even to learn to read her language. Meanwhile 
Italy is engaged in the throes of an intellectual 
rinascimento quite as vigorous as her political one. 
Her sons still class the things of thought somewhat 
too politically, making parti zan capital, clerical or 
positivist, of every conquest or concession, but that 
is only the slow dying of a habit born in darker 
times. The ancient genius of her people is evidently 
unweakened, and the tendency to individualism 
that has always marked her is beginning to mark 
her again as strongly as ever, and nowhere more 
notably than in philosophy. 

As an illustration, let me give a brief account of 
the aggressive movement in favor of "pragmatism" 

E 1 Reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and 
Scientific Methods, 1906, 3, 337-341. Ed.] 

459 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1906 ! 

which the monthly journal Leonardo (published at 
Florence, and now in its fourth year) is carrying 
on, with the youthful Giovanni Papini tipping the 
wedge of it as editor, and the scarcely less youthful 
names of Prezzolini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, 
and others, signing the more conspicuous articles. 
To one accustomed to the style of article that has 
usually discussed pragmatism, Deweyism, or radi- 
cal empiricism, in this country, and more particu- 
larly in this Journal, the Italian literature of the 
subject is a surprising, and to the present writer a 
refreshing, novelty. Our university seminaries 
(where so many bald-headed and bald-hearted young 
aspirants for the Ph.D. have all these years been 
accustomed to bore one another with the pedantry 
and technicality, formless, uncircumcised, un- 
abashed, and unrebuked, of their "papers" and "re- 
ports") are bearing at last the fruit that was to be 
expected, in an almost complete blunting of the 
literary sense in the more youthful philosophers of 
our land. Surely no other country could utter in 
the same number of months as badly written a phil- 
osophic mass as ours has published since Dewey's 
Studies in Logical Theory came out. Germany is 
not "in it" with us, in my estimation, for uncouth- 
ness of form. 

In this Florentine band of Leonardists, on the 
other hand, we find, instead of heaviness, length, 
and obscurity, lightness, clearness, and brevity, with 
no lack of profundity or learning ( quite the reverse, 
indeed), and a frolicsomeness and impertinence that 

460 



[1906] PKAGMATISM IN ITALY 

wear the charm of youth and freedom. Signor 
Papini in particular has a real genius for cutting 
and untechnical phraseology. He can write descrip- 
tive literature, polychromatic with adjectives, like 
a decadent, and clear up a subject by drawing cold 
distinctions, like a scholastic. As he is the most 
enthusiastic pragmatist of them all (some of his 
colleagues make decided reservations) I will speak 
of him exclusively. He advertises a general work on 
the pragmatist movement as in press ; but the Feb- 
ruary number of Leonardo and the last chapter of 
his just published volume, II Crepuscolo del Filo- 
sofi, 1 give his programme, and announce him as the 
most radical conceiver of pragmatism to be found 
anywhere. 

The Crepuscolo book calls itself in the preface a 
work of "passion," being a settling of the author's 
private accounts with several philosophers (Kant, 
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Spencer, Nietzsche) 
and a clearing of his mental tables from their im- 
peding rubbish, so as to leave him the freer for con- 
structive business. I will only say of the critical 
chapters that they are strongly thought and pun- 
gently written. The author hits essentials, but he 
doesn't always cover everything, and more than he 
has said, either for or against, remains to be said 
about both Kant and Hegel. It is the preface and 
the final chapter of the book that contain the pas- 
sion. The "good riddance," which is Papini's cry 
of farewell to the past of philosophy, seems most of 

1 Milano : Societa Editrice Lombarda. 
461 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS W 

all to signify for him a good-by to its exaggerated 
respect for universals and abstractions. Reality 
for him exists only distributively, in the particular 
concretes of experience. Abstracts and universals 
are only instruments by which we meet and handle 
these latter. 

In an article in Leonardo last year/ he states the 
whole pragmatic scope and programme very neatly. 
Fundamentally, he says, it means an unstiffening of 
all our theories and beliefs by attending to their 
instrumental value. It incorporates and harmonizes 
various ancient tendencies, as 

1. 'Nominalism, by which he means the appeal to 
the particular. Pragmatism is nominalistic not 
only in regard to words, but in regard to phrases 
and to theories. 

2. Utilitarianism, or the emphasizing of practical 
aspects and problems. 

3. Positivism, or the disdain of verbal and use- 
less questions. 

4. Kantism, in so far as Kant affirms the primacy 
of practical reason. 

5. Voluntarism, in the psychological sense, of the 
intellect's secondary position. 

6. Fideism, in its attitude towards religious ques- 
tions. 

Pragmatism, according to Papini, is thus only a 
collection of attitudes and methods, and its chief 
characteristic is its armed neutrality in the midst 
of doctrines. It is like a corridor in a hotel, from 

1 April, 1905, p. 45. 

462 



[1906] PKAGMATISM IN ITALY 

which a hundred doors open into a hundred cham- 
bers. In one you may see a man on his knees pray- 
ing to regain his faith; in another a desk at which 
sits some one eager to destroy all metaphysics ; in a 
third a laboratory with an investigator looking for 
new footholds by which to advance upon the future. 
But the corridor belongs to all, and all must pass 
there. Pragmatism, in short, is a great corridor- 
theory. 

In the Crepuscolo Signor Papini says that what 
pragmatism has always meant for him is the neces- 
sity of enlarging our means of action, the vanity of 
the universal as such, the bringing of our spiritual 
powers into use, and the need of making the world 
over instead of merely standing by and contemplat- 
ing it. It inspires human activity, in short, differ- 
ently from other philosophies. 

"The common denominator to which all the forms 
of human life can be reduced is this: the quest of 
instruments to act with, or, in other words, the 
quest of power." 

By "action" Signor Papini means any change into 
which man enters as a conscious cause, whether it 
be to add to existing reality or to subtract from it. 
Art, science, religion, and philosophy all are but so 
many instruments of change. Art changes things 
for our vision ; religion for our vital tone and hope ; 
science tells us how to change the course of nature 
and our conduct towards it ; philosophy is only a 
more penetrating science. Tristan and Isolde, Para- 
dise, Atoms, Substance, neither of them copies any- 

463 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £1906] 

thing real; all are creations placed above reality, 
to transform, build out, and interpret it in the in- 
terests of human need or passion. Instead of affirm- 
ing with the positivists that we must render the 
ideal world as similar as possible to the actual, Sig- 
nor Papini emphasizes our duty of turning the ac- 
tual world into as close a copy of the ideal as it will 
let us. The various ideal worlds are here because 
the real world fails to satisfy us. They are more 
adapted to us, realize more potently our desires. 
We should treat them as ideal limits towards which 
reality must evermore be approximated. 

All our ideal instruments are as yet imperfect. 
Arts, religions, sciences, philosophies, have their 
vices and defects, and the worst of all are those of 
the philosophies. But philosophy can be regener- 
ated. Since change and action are the most general 
ideals possible, philosophy can become a "prag- 
matic" in the strict sense of the word, meaning a 
general theory of human action. Ends and means 
can here be studied together, in the abstractest and 
most inclusive way, so that philosophy can resolve 
itself into a comparative discussion of all the pos- 
sible programs for man's life when man is once for 
all regarded as a creative being. 

As such, man becomes a kind of god, and where 
are we to draw his limits? In an article called 
"From Man to God" in the Leonardo for last Febru- 
ary Signor Papini lets his imagination work at 
stretching the limits. His attempt will be called 
Promethean or bullfroggian, according to the tem- 

464 



[1906] PKAGMATISM IN ITALY 

per of the reader. It has decidedly an element of 
literary swagger and conscious impertinence, but I 
confess that I am unable to treat it otherwise than 
respectfully. Why should not the divine attributes 
of omniscience and omnipotence be used by man as 
the pole-stars by which he may methodically lay his 
own course? Why should not divine rest be his own 
ultimate goal, rest attained by an activity in the end 
so immense that all desires are satisfied, and no 
more action necessary? The unexplored powers and 
relations of man, both physical and mental, are cer- 
tainly enormous; why should we impose limits on 
them a priori? And, if not, why are the most Uto- 
pian programmes not in order? 

The programme of a Man-God is surely one of the 
possible great type-programmes of philosophy. I 
myself have been slow in coming into the full in- 
wardness of pragmatism. Schiller's writings and 
those of Dewey and his school have taught me some 
of its wider reaches; and in the writings of this 
youthful Italian, clear in spite of all their brevity 
and audacity, I find not only a way in which our 
English views might be developed farther with con- 
sistency — at least so it appears to me — but also a 
tone of feeling well fitted to rally devotees and to 
make of pragmatism a new militant form of re- 
ligious or quasi-religious philosophy. 

The supreme merit of it in these adventurous re- 
gions is that it can never grow doctrinarian in ad- 
vance of verification, or make dogmatic pretensions. 

When, as one looks back from the actual world 

465 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1906 ] 

that one believes and lives and moves in, and tries 
to understand how the knowledge of its content and 
structure ever grew up step by step in our minds, 
one has to confess that objective and subjective in- 
fluences have so mingled in the process that it is 
impossible now to disentangle their contributions or 
to give to either the primacy. When a man has 
walked a mile, who can say whether his right or his 
left leg is the more responsible? and who can say 
whether the water or the clay is most to be thanked 
for the evolution of the bed of an existing river? 
Something like this I understand to be Messrs. 
Dewey's and Schiller's contention about "truth." 
The subjective and objective factors of any pres- 
ently functioning body of it are lost in the night of 
time and indistinguishable. Only the way in which 
we see a new truth develop shows us that, by an- 
alogy, subjective factors must always have been ac- 
tive. Subjective factors thus are potent, and their 
effects remain. They are in some degree creative, 
then; and this carries with it, it seems to me, the 
admissibility of the entire Italian pragmatistic pro- 
gramme. But, be the God-Man part of it sound or 
foolish, the Italian pragmatists are an extraordi- 
narily well-informed and gifted, and above all an 
extraordinarily free and spirited and unpedantic, 
group of writers. 



466 



XXXV 

THE MAD ABSOLUTE * 

[1906] 

Mr. Gore, in this Journal for October 11, tries 
very neatly to turn Mr. Schiller's joke on the abso- 
lute against the joker, and I suppose that those 
whom the latter gentleman's jokes vex are corre- 
spondingly content. 

But are the tables turned? 

It is we in our dissociated, finite shapes who are 
made, says Mr. Gore, and not the absolute. The 
absolute in its integrated shape is the very beau 
ideal of sanity, and in our own successful quest of 
it, he adds, lies our only hope of cure. Get con- 
fluent with one another, restore the original un- 
brokenness of our infinitely inclusive real self, and 
the universe will wake up well. 

But in the name of all that's absolute how did it 
ever get so sick? That we finite subjects are sick 
w r e know well enough, and no philosophy beyond the 
plainest lessons of our finite experience is needed to 
teach us that more union among ourselves would 
be remedial. But if all these distracted persons of 

[* Reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and 
Scientific Methods, 1906, 3, 656-657. It was written in reply to 
W. C. Gore's "The Mad Absolute of a Pluralist," ibid., 575-577 ; 
and in support of F. C. S. Schiller's "Idealism and the Dissocia- 
tion of Personality," iUd., 477^82. Ed.] 

467 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 1906 l 

ours really signify the absolute in a state of mad- 
ness, why, how or when did it get mad? If it was 
ever sane, its friends ought surely to explain. More- 
over, in that case must it be supposed that we have 
once for all superseded and abolished its primal 
wholeness, or does the wholeness still obtain entire 
behind the scenes, coexisting with our fragmentary 
persons, and, like another Sally Beauchamp, know- 
ing about us all the while we know so little about 
it? 

If the former alternative be the true one, we are 
back in the time-process and the mystery of a fall, 
re-edited in these days by Messrs. Kenouvier and 
Prat. Mr. Gore's monist puts the case in time-form, 
as a dramatic event, and seems to adopt this horn 
of the dilemma. But another monist might con- 
sider this unorthodox, and insist that the absolute 
is "timeless" and that it lives, Sally-like, alongside 
of our split-off selves. 

But in this latter case what would be the sig- 
nificance of that reunion of these selves, from which, 
according to the absolutist philosophy, we are to 
hope for a cure? Is it to produce a second absolute, 
duplicating the first one? Or is it to be imagined 
as a reabsorption rather, with only the one indivis- 
ible primary absolute left? How ought we to con- 
ceive it at all? Reabsorption would seem inadmis- 
sible on absolutist principles. It would hardly go 
without the time-process; and would moreover be 
strongly suggestive of the cure of a disease upon the 
eternal absolute subject, much as an eruption may 

468 



[1906] THE MAD ABSOLUTE 

break out and be "resolved" again upon one's skin. 
But the absolute can have no skin, no outside. 

I doubt, therefore, whether Mr. Gore's monist has 
greatly helped his client's plight. Nor would it es- 
sentially mend matters for him simply to declare 
that the absolute is eternally three things — its pure 
identical self, the finite emanation or eruption and 
the reabsorption, all in one. And yet I believe that 
the path that Mr. Schiller and he have struck into is 
likely to prove a most important lead. The abso- 
lute is surely one of the great hypotheses of philos- 
ophy; it must be thoroughly discussed. Its advo- 
cates have usually treated it only as a logical neces- 
sity ; and very bad logic, as it seems to me, have they 
invariably used. It is high time that the hypothesis 
of a world-consciousness should be discussed seri- 
ously, as we discuss any other question of fact ; and 
that means inductively and in the light of all the 
natural analogies that can be brought to bear. No 
philosophy can ever do more than interpret the 
whole, which is unknown, after the analogy of some 
particular part which we know. So far, Fechner 
is the only thinker who has done any elaborate work 
of this kind on the world-soul question, although 
Koyce deserves praise for having used arguments 
for analogy along with his logical proofs. I cannot 
help thinking that Fechner's successors, if he ever 
have any, must make great use of just such cases as 
the one so admirably analyzed and told by Dr. 
Prince. 1 

1 Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality. 

469 



XXXVI 

CONTKOVEBSY ABOUT TKUTH 1 

[1907] 

To the Editors of the Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology and Scientific Methods: 

The pragmatistic conception of truth is so impor- 
tant that no amount of printer's ink spent upon it 
ought to be considered wasted. My exposition of it 
in No. 6 of this year's Journal was sent back to me 
with copious critical annotations on its margins by 
Prof. John E. Eussell. This led to an exchange of 
letters between us, in which one issue, at least, got 
sharpened; and as that issue is probably the most 
prevalent stumbling-block, I ask you, in the inter- 
est of clarifying the question, to print the corre- 
spondence as it was written. I subjoin our letters. 

Sincerely yours, 

William James. 



Dear Eussell: Your notes bring out the exact 
point of misunderstanding, and the exact difficulty 
with which pragmatism has to cope in making con- 
verts. 

I 1 A series of letters exchanged with Prof. John E. Russell of 
Williams College. Reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, 
Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1907, 4, 289-296. Ed.] 

470 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

You say : "Events in the way of verification do not 
make an idea true, they only prove that it is true or 
was true" — there is the whole difference between us 
in a nutshell. 

The statement seems to mean that truth is a qual- 
ity of the idea numerically distinct from the events 
which are its proof; but don't you then think that 
the said quality ought to be somehow definable as it 
is in and per sef I hoped for the definition as I read 
your comments; but in the end I found no new 
definition, only the old ones of "agreement with 
reality" and of "thinking the reality as it is." 

Now what does agreement mean? Does it mean 
anything different from (or prior to) the copyings 
and leadings by which pragmatism explicates the 
word? These are perfectly well-defined relations of 
the idea to the reality or to the reality's associates 
and surroundings. 

And what does "thinking the reality as it is" 
mean unless it be either copying it, or leading 
straight up to it, or thinking it in its right sur- 
roundings — which last notion means terminating at 
places to which it, the reality, also leads? 

You speak of Leverrier's idea of Neptune being 
true before it had led him to verify it. Doubtless ! 
but pray define its truth apart from those leadings 
and guidings. The word truth means just such 
leadings and guidings. Had his idea led him to 
point his telescope to a vacant part of the sky, it 
would have been untrue — is untruth, then, also a 
resident and previous quality in ideas? Leading to 

471 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 19 ^] 

that point, Leverrier's idea certainly was true — I 
can conceive no other kind of truth — and, of conrse, 
quite as true when only verifiable as it was after 
the verification. Even so the star was Neptune 
both before and after its baptism, for in the star 
universe that star is all that Neptune ever can 
mean. 

In the case of Neptune you don't separate the 
name from the fact found, and make it a cause 
thereof; you don't say the star was found at that 
point because it was Neptune ; but in the case of the 
idea you say it led to that point because it was true. 
But just as Neptune means nothing but the star 
which at a certain moment is at that point, so true 
means nothing but the idea which, instead of lead- 
ing you elsewhere, leads you thither. Otherwise it's 
like raising a dispute about whether blood is red 
because it looks so, or looks so because it's red. You 
ought to insist on the latter formula ; / call them 
equally correct. You may say either that the lead- 
ing makes the idea true or that it proves it true, for 
you are only talking of the same thing in different 
words: The leading both makes you call the idea 
true, and proves that you have called it so justly. 

Take another illustration. Does bread nourish 
us because it is food? Or is it food because it nour- 
ishes? Or, finally, are being food and nourishing 
only two ways of naming the same physiological 
events? And if this last view be correct here, why 
isn't it just as correct in the case of truth? 

The concrete facts denoted by the word truth are 

472 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

ideas that guide us towards certain termini. Other 
connotations of the word than these same guidings 
it is for you to show. If you can't, then we may 
say either that the ideas are true because they guide, 
or that they guide because they are true : To be true 
and to guide are precisely equipollent terms of 
which you may make either you like the more pri- 
mordial in significance. 

Otherwise (and this is the point which I empha- 
size, and on which I insist) you must point out some 
substantive connotation in the word truth over and 
above such guiding processes. If you can do this, 
I surrender ; but I don't see how you can do it. 

It seems to me that there is no other connotation, 
any more than there is in the case of Neptune. Nep- 
tune means the star that gets there, and true means 
the idea that "gets there." Agreement, correspond- 
ence, thinking the object as it is, all resolve them- 
selves into guidings, into "getting there" somehow. 
You argue as if, in spite of its getting there, an 
idea might still be false, unless the intrinsic epi- 
stemological virtue of being true were superadded. 
I wish you'd explain how. To me it couldn't be 
false under those circumstances. 

Revert to food. In this case we do have some ad- 
ditional connotations — a certain chemical structure, 
say — that explain the physiological events in ad- 
vance. (We know nothing of such connotations as 
yet, but we suppose they may some day be known. ) 
If the word food should connote primarily such 
chemical structure, and only secondarily digestions, 

473 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1907] 

absorptions, etc., then you might contend that bread 
nourishes because it is food, and isn't food because 
it nourishes. But you would still be on purely 
verbal ground; and even then you would have to 
define positively these new-fangled connotations. 

Meanwhile please observe that the word true has 
absolutely no such further connotations; it has no 
more of them than Neptune has. It denotes certain 
ideas, and it connotes their "getting there." 

Here I must leave the matter. As a pragmatist, 
I can defy you to find any other practical meaning to 
the word truth than that it guides and gets us there. 
If, failing to do that, you nevertheless call our ac- 
count an inadequate account of what you mean by 
truth, why then, again as a pragmatist, I can wash 
my hands of the whole controversy. It is trivial. 
It has no meaning. 

Yours, etc., 

William James. 



II 

Dear James: I think the issue between the in- 
tellectualist and the pragmatist narrows itself 
down to the question of the validity and value of 
two distinctions. The first is the distinction be- 
tween the idea's being true and the proof that the 
idea is true. The second distinction is that between 
a true idea and its instrumental function in leading, 
guiding behavior to desirable issues in experience. 

The intellectualist insists that these distinctions 

474 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

are valid and important to a right conception of 
knowledge. The pragmatist denies this; he con- 
tends that the terms "true/' "truth/' "leading/' 
"guiding," "getting there/' etc., are different names 
for the same thing; that the term "truth" applied 
to an idea has the same function that the name 
"Neptune," for instance, has when applied to a 
particular planetary body in the heavens. The 
pragmatist, after having made "agreeing with 
reality," "being as it is thought," etc., mean lead- 
ing, guiding, coming into practical relations with, 
getting there, etc., challenges the intellectualist to 
point out any other significant connection which his 
terms "true," "truth," etc., can have. The prag- 
matist says to the intellectualist, "I pray you to 
define the truth of an idea apart from its leadings 
and guidings. I defy you to supply other mean- 
ings to the word 'truth' than that of guiding and 
getting us there. Does 'agreement' mean anything 
different from that copying and leading by which 
pragmatism explicates this word?" 

Now this puts the intellectualist in a hard situa- 
tion. If he answers, "I mean by a true idea, an idea 
that agrees with, that copies or corresponds to 
reality," the pragmatist replies, "But what is it to 
agree with, to copy, etc., reality, if it be not just to 
lead, to guide, to get there?" Now what can the 
intellectualist say in reply? Suppose he undertakes 
to define his meaning of truth in different terms, 
these terms would suffer the same fate; the prag- 
matist would explicate them in his terms, of lead- 

475 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 19 ^] 

ing, guiding, getting there, etc., and then ask the 
naked intellectualist to put on different garments. 

I can see no other way by which the intellectualist 
can escape this dilemma than simply to abide by 
the terms by which he has defined a true idea, and 
insist that it is the pragmatist who has forced upon 
these terms a meaning they can not take without 
involving one in intellectual confusion. The in- 
tellectualist should, therefore, maintain that the 
terms in which he explicates the meaning of a true 
idea give a perfectly denned relation of the idea to 
reality. What more definite relation can legiti- 
mately be demanded? How can the intellectualist 
in fairness be asked to define in other terms what 
he means by "agreement with," by "copying," by 
"thinking reality as it is" ? May he not with more 
propriety ask the pragmatist by what right he 
makes these terms mean leading, guiding, getting 
there, etc.? 

This leads me to the real issue between the intel- 
lectualist and the pragmatist, and first to that dis- 
tinction between an idea's being true and the proof 
that it is or was true. Let us take the case of Lever- 
rier and the discovery of the planet Neptune. We 
have the following things : — 

1. Certain perturbations in the motions of the 
planet Uranus which could not be explained by 
the influence of the known bodies of the solar 
system. 

2. We have Leverrier's idea of a planetary body 
of a certain mass and position in the heavens. 

476 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

3. We have the agreement between the calculated 
perturbations which this hypothetical body should 
produce in the motions of Uranus, and the actual 
perturbations observed. 

4. We have the discovery of this planet, after- 
wards named Neptune, by a German astronomer 
who, following the suggestion of Leverrier, pointed 
his telescope to that exact spot in the heavens where 
this planet was. 

Now the intellectualist contends that Leverrier's 
hypothetical conception was true the instant it 
existed in his mind, and that the trueness of his 
idea consisted in its agreement with a fact, a piece 
of reality, an object at that time existing, viz., that 
planet occupying a particular place in the physical 
universe. It was the existence of Neptune then and 
there which made it possible for him to have a true 
idea at that time. Had he thought differently about 
this planet, this same body would have made his 
thought untrue. His idea was true for no other 
reason, and true in no other meaning of the terms, 
than that it agreed with its object. Furthermore, 
the contention of the intellectualist is, that had 
Leverrier gone no farther in his undertaking, had no 
telescope ever discovered that planet, his idea 
would have been as true as it was after the discovery 
which completed the verification of his hypothesis. 
His idea did not get its quality of truth by the 
process of verification — this only produced the cer- 
tainty in his and in other minds that this idea was 
true. It is one thing for an idea to be true — it is 

477 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £ 1907 1 

quite a different thing to prove that this idea is true. 
It is one thing to hit a mark ; to know that you have 
hit the mark is a different thing. A bell may ring 
to let you know that you have made a bull's-eye ; the 
ringing of the bell is the sign, the criterion, of the 
correctness of your aim, but it hardly constitutes 
the trueness of your aim, or your making the bulPs- 
eye. Leverrier's idea hit its mark ; what was sub- 
sequently done made that fact known. Truth and 
verification are therefore different things, and to 
make the truth or the verity of an idea consist in its 
verification is to introduce mental confusion, and 
to make unintelligible such a procedure as Lever- 
rier's in the discovery of Neptune. It is true to say 
that a true idea is one that can be verified, and that 
only true ideas can be verified, but, then, these ideas 
are not true because they are verified; they are 
verifiable because they are already true. 

This brings the intellectualist to the second dis- 
tinction upon which he insists, viz., the distinction 
between truth and its valuation in terms of desir- 
able experience. To say that truth should have 
good practical consequences, that those ideas are 
true which work well in practice, that every true 
idea leads into satisfying experiences of some sort, 
is to say what no intellectualist need deny. But to 
say that an idea is true because it has this prac- 
tically good issue, or because it works well, is to 
say quite a different thing, and something which no 
intellectualist can accept. "There are," so con- 
tends the intellectualist, "conditions on which our 

478 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

human action or the course of experience depends, 
and to which our actions, our experiences, must con- 
form if they are to have successful and satisfying 
issues. Only as a particular experience is in agree- 
ment with conditions of experience uberhaupt can it 
lead to beneficial or desirable experiences. Ideas, 
therefore, can work well, can lead successfully, 
only if they first agree with reality, with the ob- 
jective and determining conditions of our experi- 
ence. " This is just the fact that the pragma tist 
overlooks when he identifies the truth of an idea 
with its practically good leadings and consequences. 
He insists that truth shall be practical, but he fails 
to answer the question, How can an idea, or a course 
of experience, have a practically good leading or 
result? 

To take your illustration of bread as food: you 
ask : "Does bread nourish because it is 'f ood,' or is it 
food because it nourishes? Or are being food and 
nourishing only two ways of meaning the same 
physiological events?" The intellectualist answers : 
"Bread nourishes us because it contains those 
chemical elements which are nutritive. A particu- 
lar substance is not bread because it nourishes — 
it nourishes because it is bread. Being food and 
nourishing are two ways of meaning the same phys- 
iological events; but being bread and nourishing 
are not two ways of meaning the same physiologi- 
cal events." 

The intellectualist need not deny that a true idea 
has an instrumental function in relation to our 

479 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 1907 ^ 

various needs ; that a true idea is a tool to be used 
in the service of the will or our practical nature; 
but he contends that the efficiency of the instru- 
ment, the serviceableness of the tool, depends upon 
the construction of the instrument, upon the quality 
of the tool. That a knife cuts well, proves, indeed, 
that it is a good knife ; but that which enables the 
knife to cut well is the quality of the steel and the 
fashion of the instrument — in other words, the knife 
cuts well because it was rightly made. Its cutting 
well merely proves that the knife was rightly made. 
The proof of the pudding is in the eating; but it 
will hardly do to say, therefore the good eating is 
the pudding, or is that in the pudding which gives 
us that satisfying experience of eating this pudding. 

Yours, etc., 

John E. Russell. 



Ill 

Dear Russell: Your letter is so ultraclear and 
brings the question down to where the wool is so 
short, that I can't help dashing on 2 one more word, 
though I know I can't convert you. 

First, I note with extreme pleasure your explicit 
confession that "truth" in the intellectualist sense 
cannot be further denned. It means "agreement," 
and agreement means "truth." That is one point 
clearly gained. 

My second remark is simply this: If "true" be 
not an abstract name for the property of verifiabil- 

480 



[1907] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

ity in an idea, then an idea might conceivably be 
trne though absolutely unverifiable. There might be 
no empirical mediation between it and its object, 
no leading either to the object, or towards it, or into 
its associates, and yet it might still be true as 
"agreeing" with the object. 

But then you are met by Royce's old argument : 
How do you know it means to be true of that object? 
It might "agree" perfectly in the sense of copying, 
yet not be true, unless it meant to copy, und zwar 
that particular original. An egg isn't true of an- 
other egg, because it is not supposed to aim at the 
other egg at all, or to intend it. Neither is my tooth- 
ache true of your toothache. Royce makes the ab- 
solute do the aiming and intending. I make the 
chain of empirical intermediaries do it. What does 
it in your philosophy? 

Yours, etc., 

William James. 

IV 

Dear James : According to the meaning of a true 
idea I have been maintaining, it does follow not 
only that an idea is true prior to its verification, 
but also that an idea may remain unverified in our 
human experience. I would not, however, say that 
an idea can be true and be absolutely unverifiable ; 
for there may be such a being as Royce's absolute, 
and if so, no true idea can remain unverified. In 
the experience of the Roycean absolute, truth and 

481 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS W7] 

verification do not fall apart as they do in our 
human experience. The Roycean question with 
which you confront me, I must confess, has never 
given me a pause or seemed a serious one at all. 
"How do you know that your idea means to be true 
of its object?" I answer: "When I think, I know 
what I am thinking about, just as I know what mark 
I am aiming at when I am engaged in target-shoot- 
ing. My thinking as such is selective of its object, 
and knows its own intent, viz., to think that object 
as that object is. My thought picks out this par- 
ticular piece of the real world, and means to agree 
with it, just as I pick out my target and intend to 
hit it. For instance, I am now thinking of you, 
among your books, in your study at Cambridge ; I 
mean to think of you and your immediate surround- 
ings, your present doings, as you and they are now 
at this hour, — ten o'clock in the morning. In so 
doing, I know what object I mean to agree with in 
my present thinkings." 

Now the Roycean absolute may exist, and if it 
does, he of course knows whether or not my present 
thought of you is now true ; but the knowing of that 
being is no more necessary to constitute the truth 
of my idea or to explain the fact that I aim at you 
in my idea, than is the presence of an onlooker when 
I am shooting at a mark essential to my aiming 
at and hitting or missing that mark. Nor does it 
seem to me that your chain of intermediaries is in 
any manner essential to the meaning, the intent, or 
the truth of my present thought of you, which is 

482 



[1307] CONTROVERSY ABOUT TRUTH 

sufficient unto itself both to select its object and to 
determine its truth or untruth. 

Yours, etc., 

John E. Russell. 



Dear Russell: We seem now to have laid bare 
our exact difference. According to me "meaning" 
a certain object and "agreeing" with it are abstract 
notions of both of which definite concrete accounts 
can be given. 

According to you, they shine by their own inner 
light and no further account can be given. They 
may even "obtain" (in cases where human verifica- 
tion is impossible) and make no empirical differ- 
ence to us. To me, using the pragmatic method of 
testing concepts, this would mean that the word 
"truth" might on certain occasions have no mean- 
ing whatever. I still must hold to its having 
always a meaning, and continue to contend for that 
meaning being unfoldable and representable in ex- 
periential terms. 

Yours, etc., 

William James. 



483 



XXXVII 

KEPOKT ON MES. PIPEE'S HOBGSON- 
CONTEOL * 

[1909] 

. . . That a "will-to-personate" is a factor in the 
Piper-phenomenon, I fully believe, and I believe 
with unshakable firmness that this will is able to 
draw on supernormal sources of information. It 
can "tap/' possibly the sitter's memories, possibly 
those of distant human beings, possibly some cosmic 
reservoir in which the memories of earth are stored, 
whether in the shape of "spirits" or not. If this 
were the only will concerned in the performance, 
the phenomenon would be humbug pure and simple, 
and the minds tapped telepathically in it would 
play an entirely passive role — that is, the tele- 
pathic data would be fished out by the personat- 
ing will, not forced upon it by desires to communi- 
cate, acting externally to itself. 

But it is possible to complicate the hypothesis. 

Extraneous "wills to communicate" may contribute 

to the results as well as a "will to personate," and 

the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, 

t 1 Selection reprinted from Proceedings of the American So- 
ciety for Psychical Research, 1909, 3, 583-589. The report also 
appeared in the Proceedings of the {English] Society for Psy- 
chical Research, 1909, 23, 1-121. This selection consists of gen- 
eral conclusions appended to a report of sittings with Mrs. 
Piper in which alleged messages from the late Richard Hodgson 
are recorded and tested. See note above, p. 438. Ed.] 

484 



[1909] REPOET ON HODGSON-CONTEOL 

though capable of helping each other out. The will 
to communicate, in our present instance, would be, 
on the prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson's 
surviving spirit ; and a natural way of representing 
the process would be to suppose the spirit to have 
found that by pressing, so to speak, against "the 
light," it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes 
of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of 
the trance-talk on this side. The two wills might 
thus strike up a sort of partnership and stir each 
other up. It might even be that the "will to 
personate" would be inert unless it were aroused to 
activity by the other will. We might imagine the 
relation to be analogous to that of two physical 
bodies, from neither of which, when alone, mechani- 
cal, thermal, or electrical effects can proceed, but if 
the other body be present, and show a difference 
of "potential," action starts up and goes on apace. 
Conceptions such as these seem to connect in 
schematic form the various elements in the case. 
Its essential factors are done justice to; and, by 
changing the relative amounts in which the rubbish- 
making and the truth-telling wills contribute to the 
resultant, we can draw up a table in which every 
type of manifestation, from silly planchette-writing 
up to Hector's best utterances, finds its proper 
place. Personally, I must say that, although I have 
to confess that no crucial proof of the presence of 
the "will to communicate" seems to me yielded by 
the Hodgson-control taken alone, and in the sittings 
to which I have had access, yet the total effect in the 

485 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS WOW 

way of dramatic probability of the whole mass of 
similar phenomena on my mind, is to make me 
believe that a "will to communicate" is in some 
shape there. I cannot demonstrate it, but prac- 
tically I am inclined to "go in" for it, to bet on it 
and take the risks. 

The question then presents itself : In what shape 
is it most reasonable to suppose that the will thus 
postulated is actually there? And here again there 
are various pneumatological possibilities, which 
must be considered first in abstract form. Thus the 
will to communicate may come either from per- 
manent entities, or from an entity that arises for the 
occasion. E. H.'s spirit would be a permanent 
entity; and inferior parasitic spirits ("daimons," 
elementals, or whatever their traditional names 
might be) would be permanent entities. An im- 
provised entity might be a limited process of con- 
sciousness arising in the cosmic reservoir of earth's 
memories, when certain conditions favoring sys- 
tematized activity in particular tracts thereof were 
fulfilled. The conditions in that case might be 
conceived after the analogy of what happens when 
two poles of different potential are created in a 
mass of matter, and cause a current of electricity, 
or what not, to pass through an intervening tract of 
space until then the seat of rest. 

To consider the case of permanent entities first, 
there is no a priori reason why human spirits and 
other spiritual beings might not either co-operate 
at the same time in the same phenomenon, or alter- 

486 



[1909] EEPORT ON HODGSON-CONTKOL 

nately produce different manifestations. Prima 
facie, and as a matter of "dramatic" probability, 
other intelligences than our own appear on an enor- 
mous scale in the historic mass of material which 
Myers first brought together under the title of Auto- 
matisms. The refusal of modern "enlightenment" 
to treat "possession" as an hypothesis to be spoken 
of as even possible, in spite of the massive human 
tradition based on concrete experience in its favor, 
has always seemed to me a curious example of the 
power of fashion in things scientific. That the 
demon- theory will have its innings again is to my 
mind absolutely certain. One has to be "scientific" 
indeed, to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect 
no such possibility. But if the liability to have 
one's somnambulistic or automatic processes parti- 
cipated in and interfered with by spiritual entities 
of a different order ever turn out to be a probable 
fact, then not only what I have called the will to 
communicate, but also the will to personate may 
fall outside of the medium's own dream-life. The 
humbugging may not be chargeable to her all alone, 
centres of consciousness lower than hers may take 
part in it, just as higher ones may occasion some 
of the more inexplicable items of the veridical cur- 
rent in the stream. 

The plot of possibilities thus thickens; and it 
thickens still more when we ask how a will which 
is dormant or relatively dormant during the inter- 
vals may become consciously reanimated as a spirit- 
personality by the occurrence of the medium's 

487 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS U909] 

trance. A certain theory of Fechner's helps my 
own imagination here, so I will state it briefly for 
my reader's benefit. 

Fechner in his Zend-Avesta and elsewhere 1 as- 
sumes that mental and physical life run parallel, all 
memory-processes being, according to him, co-ordi- 
nated with material processes. If an act of yours 
is to be consciously remembered hereafter, it must 
leave traces on the material universe such that 
when the traced parts of the said universe sys- 
tematically enter into activity together the act is 
consciously recalled. During your life the traces 
are mainly in your brain; but after your death, 
since your brain is gone, they exist in the shape of 
all the records of your actions which the outer 
world stores up as the effects, immediate or remote, 
thereof, the cosmos being in some degree, however 
slight, made structurally different by every act of 
ours that takes place in it. 2 Now, just as the air of 

1 Zend-Avesta, second edition, 1901, Sec. XXI., and following. 
Compare also Elwood Worcester : The Living Word, New York, 
Moffatt, Yard & Co., 1908, Part II., in which a more popular 
account of Fechner's theory of immortality is given. And Will- 
iam James, A Pluralistic Universe, Longmans, Green and Co. 
1909, Lecture IV. 

*"It is Handel's work, not the body with which he did the 
work, that pulls us half over London. There is not an action of 
a muscle in a horse's leg upon a winter's night as it drags a 
carriage to the Albert Hall but what is in connection with, and 
part outcome of, the force generated when Handel sat in his 
room at Gropsall and wrote the Messiah. . . . This is the true 
Handel, who is more a living power among us one hundred and 
twenty-two years after his death than during the time he was 
amongst us in the body." — Samuel Butler, in the New Quarterly, 
I., 303, March, 1908. 

488 



[1909] EEPORT ON HODGSON-CONTROL 

the same room can be simultaneously used by many 
different voices for communicating with different 
pairs of ears, or as the ether of space can carry 
many simultaneous messages to and from mutually 
attuned Marconi-stations, so the great continuum 
of material nature can have certain tracts within 
it thrown into emphasized activity whenever activ- 
ity begins in any part or parts of a tract in which 
the potentiality of such systematic activity inheres. 
The bodies (including, naturally, the brains) of 
Hodgson's friends who come as sitters, are of course 
parts of the material universe which carry some of 
the traces of his ancient acts. They function as re- 
ceiving stations. Hodgson (at one time of his life 
at any rate) was inclined to suspect that the sitter 
himself acts "psychometrieally," or by his body 
being what, in the trance-jargon, is called an "in- 
fluence," in attracting the right spirits and eliciting 
the right communications from the other side. If, 
now, the rest of the system of physical traces left 
behind by Hodgson's acts were by some sort of 
mutual induction throughout its extent, thrown into 
gear and made to vibrate all at once, by the pres- 
ence of such human bodies to the medium, we should 
have a Hodgson-system active in the cosmos again, 
and the "conscious aspect" of this vibrating system 
might be Hodgson's spirit redivivus, and recollect- 
ing and willing in a certain momentary way. There 
seems fair evidence of the reality of psychometry; 
so that this scheme covers the main phenomena in a 
vague general way. In particular, it would account 

489 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 19 ° 9 l 

for the "confusion" and "weakness" that are such 
prevalent features : the "system" of physical traces 
corresponding to the given spirit would then be 
only imperfectly aroused. It tallies vaguely with 
the analogy of energy finding its way from higher 
to lower levels. The sitter, with his desire to re- 
ceive, forms, so to speak, a drainage-opening or 
sink; the medium, with her desire to personate, 
yields the nearest lying material to be drained off, 
while the spirit desiring to communicate is drawn 
in by the current set up and swells the latter by its 
own contributions. 

It is enough to indicate these various possibilities, 
which a serious student of this part of nature has 
to weigh together, and between which his decision 
must fall. His vote will always be cast (if it ever 
be cast) by the sense of the dramatic probabilities 
of nature which the sum total of his experience has 
begotten in him. / myself feel as if an external will 
to communicate were probably there, that is, I find 
myself doubting, in consequence of my whole ac- 
quaintance wkh that sphere of phenomena, that 
Mrs. Piper's dream-life, even equipped with "tele- 
pathic" powers, accounts for all the results found. 
But if asked whether the will to communicate be 
Hodgson's, or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of 
Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more facts, 
facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion 
for fifty or a hundred years. . . . 



490 



XXXVIII 
BEADLEY OE BEEGSOST? x 

[1910] 

Dr. Bradley has summed up his Weltanschauung 
in last October's Mind/ in an article which for sin- 
cerity and brevity leaves nothing to be desired. 
His thought and Bergson's run parallel for such 
a distance, yet diverge so utterly at last that a com- 
parison seems to me instructive. The watershed 
is such a knife-edge that no reader who leans to 
one side or the other can after this plead ignorance 
of the motives of his choice. 

Bradley's first great act of candor in philosophy 
was his breaking loose from the Kantian tradition 
that immediate feeling is all disconnectedness. In 
his Logic as well as in his Appearance he insisted 
that in the flux of feeling we directly encounter 
reality, and that its form, as thus encountered, is 
the continuity and wholeness of a transparent 
much-at-once. This is identically Bergson's doc- 
trine. In affirming the "endosmosis" of adjacent 
parts of "living" experience, the French writer 

C 1 Reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and 
Scientific Methods, 1910, 7, 29-33. Ed.] 

[ 2 F. H. Bradley, "Coherence and Contradiction," Mind, 1909, 
N.S. 18, 489-508. Ed.] 

491 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS £ 191 °] 

treats the minimum of feeling as an immediately 
intuited much-at-once. 

The idealist tradition is that feelings, aborig- 
inally discontinuous, are woven into continuity by 
the various synthetic concepts which the intellect 
applies. Both Bradley and Bergson contradict this 
flatly; and although their tactics are so different, 
their battle is the same. They destroy the notion 
that conception is essentially a unifying process. 
For Bergson all concepts are discrete; and though 
you can get the discrete out of the continuous, out 
of the discrete you can never construct the continu- 
ous again. Concepts, moreover, are static, and can 
never be adequate substitutes for a perceptual flux 
of which activity and change are inalienable fea- 
tures. Concepts, says Bergson, make things less, 
not more, intelligible, when we use them seriously 
and radically. They serve us practically more than 
theoretically. Throwing their map of abstract 
terms and relations round our present experience, 
they show its bearings and let us plan our way. 

Bradley is just as independent of rationalist tra- 
dition, and is more thoroughgoing still in his criti- 
cism of the conceptual function. When we handle 
felt realities by our intellect they grow, according 
to him, less and less comprehensible; activity be- 
comes inconstruable, relation contradictory, change 
inadmissible, personality unintelligible, time, space, 
and causation impossible — nothing survives the 
Bradleyan wreck. 

The breach which the two authors make with 

492 



[1910] BRADLEY OR BERGSON? 

previous rationalist opinion is complete, and they 
keep step with each other perfectly up to the point 
where they diverge. Sense-perception first develops 
into conception; and then conception, developing 
its subtler and more contradictory implications, 
comes to an end of its usefulness for both authors, 
and runs itself into the ground. Arrived at this 
conviction, Bergson drops conception — which ap- 
parently has done us all the good it can do; and, 
turning back towards perception with its trans- 
parent multiplicity:in-union, he takes its data in- 
tegrally up into philosophy, as a kind of material 
which nothing else can replace. The fault of our 
perceptual data, he tells us, is not of nature, but 
only of extent; and the way to know reality inti- 
mately is, according to this philosopher, to sink into 
those data and get our sympathetic imagination 
to enlarge their oounds. Beep knowledge is not 
of the conceptually mediated, but of the immediate 
type. Bergson thus allies himself with old-fash- 
ioned empiricism, on the one hand, and with mys- 
ticism, on the other. His breach with rationalism 
could not possibly be more thorough than it is. 

Bradley's breach is just as thorough in its first 
two steps. The form of oneness in the flow of feel- 
ing is an attribute of reality which even the abso- 
lute must preserve. Concepts are an organ of mis- 
understanding rather than of understanding; they 
turn the "reality" which we "encounter" into an 
"appearance" which we "think." But with all this 
anti-rationalist matter, Bradley is faithful to his 

493 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS t 191 °] 

anti-empiricist manner to the end. Crude unmedi- 
ated feelings shall never form a part of "truth." 
"Judgment, on our view," he writes, "transcends 
and must transcend the immediate unity of feeling 
upon which it can not cease to depend. Judg- 
ment has to qualify the real ideally. . . . This is 
the fundamental inconsistency of judgment, . . . 
for ideas can not qualify reality as reality is quali- 
fied immediately in feeling, . . . The reality as 
conditioned in feeling has been in principle aban- 
doned, while other conditions have not been 
found." 1 

Abandoned in "principle," Mr. Bradley says ; and, 
in sooth, nothing but a sort of religious principle 
against admitting "untransformed" feeling into 
philosophy would seem to explain his procedure 
from here onwards. "At the entrance of philos- 
ophy," he says, "there appears to be a point at 
which the roads divide. By the one way you set 
out to seek truth in ideas. ... On this road what 
is sought is ideas, and nothing else is current. . . . 
If you enter here you are committed to this prin- 
ciple. . . . [This] whole way doubtless may be de- 
lusion; but, if you choose to take this way ... no 
possible appeal to designation [i.e., to feeling] in 
the end is permitted. . . . This I take to be the 
way of philosophy. ... It is not the way of life 
or of common knowledge, and to commit oneself 
to such a principle may be said to depend upon 
choice. The way of life starts from and in the 

1 Mind, October, 1909, p. 498. 

494 



[1910] BRADLEY OR BERGSON? 

end it rests on dependence upon feeling. . . . Out- 
side of philosophy there is no consistent course but 
to accept the unintelligible. For worse or for bet- 
ter the man who stands on particular feeling must 
remain outside of philosophy. ... I recognize that 
in life and in ordinary knowledge one can never 
wholly cease to rest on this ground. But how to 
take over into ultimate theory and to use there 
this certainty of feeling, while still leaving that 
untransformed, I myself do not know. I admit that 
philosophy, as I conceive it, is one-sided. I under- 
stand the dislike of it and the despair of it while 
this its defect is not remedied. But to remedy the 
defect by importing bodily into philosophy the 
'this' and 'thine,' as they are felt, to my mind 
brings destruction on the spot." 1 

Mr. Bradley's "principle" seems to be only that 
of doggedly following a line once entered on to the 
bitterest of ends. We encounter reality in feeling, 
and find that when we develop it into ideas it be- 
comes more intelligible in certain definite respects. 
We then have "truth" instead of reality; which 
truth, however, pursued beyond a certain practical 
point, develops into the whole bog of unintelligibili- 
ties through which the critical part of Appearance 
and Reality wades. The wise and natural course 
at this point would seem to be to drop the notion 
that truth is a thoroughgoing improvement on re- 
ality, to confess that its value is limited, and to 
hark back. But there is nothing that Mr. Bradley, 

1 Mind, October, 1909, pp. 500-502. 
495 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS t 191 °l 

religiously loyal to the direction of development 
once entered upon, will not do sooner than this. 
Forward, forward, let us range! He makes the 
desperate transconceptual leap, assumes beyond 
the whole ideal perspective an ultimate "supra- 
relational" and transconceptual reality in which 
somehow the wholeness and certainty and unity of 
feeling, which we turned our backs on forever when 
we committed ourselves to the leading of ideas, 
are supposed to be resurgent in transfigured form ; 
and shows us as the only authentic object of phil- 
osophy, with its "way of ideas," an absolute which 
"can be" and "must be" and therefore "is." "It 
shall be" is the only candid way of stating its re- 
lation to belief ; and Mr. Bradley's statement comes 
very near to that. 

How could the elements of a situation be made 
more obvious? Or what could bring to a sharper 
focus the factor of personal choice involved? 

The way of philosophy is not the way of life, Mr. 
Bradley admits, but for the philosopher, he con- 
tinues, it seems to be all there is — which is like 
saying that the way of starvation is not the way 
of life, but to the starveling it is all there is. Be 
it so! Though what obliges one to become either 
such a philosopher or such a starveling does not 
clearly appear. The only motive I can possibly 
think of for choosing to be a philosopher on these 
painful terms is the old and obstinate intellectual- 
ist prejudice in favor of universals. They are 
loftier, nobler, more rational objects than the par- 

496 



[1910] BRADLEY OR BERGSON? 

tieulars of sense. In their direction, then, and 
away from feeling, should a mind conscious of its 
high vocation always turn its face. Not to enter 
life is a higher vocation than to enter it, on this 
view. 

The motive is pathetically simple, and any one 
can take it in. On the thin watershed between 
life and philosophy, Mr. Bradley tumbles to phil- 
osophy's call. Down he slides, to the dry valley of 
"absolute" mare's nests and abstractions, the habi- 
tation of the fictitious suprarelational being which 
his will prefers. Never was there such a case of 
will-to-believe ; for Mr. Bradley, unlike other anti- 
empiricists, deludes himself neither as to feeling 
nor as to thought : the one reveals for him the inner 
nature of reality perfectly, the other falsifies it 
utterly as soon as you carry it beyond the first few 
steps. Yet once committed to the conceptual direc- 
tion, Mr. Bradley thinks we can't reverse, we can 
save ourselves only by hoping that the absolute 
will re-realize unintelligibly and "somehow," the 
unity, wholeness, certainty, etc., which feeling so 
immediately and transparently made us acquainted 
with at first. 

Bergson and the empiricists, on the other hand, 
tumble to life's call, and turn into the valley where 
the green pastures and the clear waters always 
were. If in sensible particulars reality reveals the 
manyness-in-oneness of its constitution in so con- 
vincing a way, why then withhold, if you will, the 
name of "philosophy" from perceptual knowledge, 

497 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 191 °3 

but recognize that perceptual knowledge is at any 
rate the only complete kind of knowledge, and let 
"philosophy 1 ' in Bradley's sense pass for the one- 
sided affair which he candidly confesses that it is. 
When the alternative lies between knowing life 
in its full thickness and activity, as one acquainted 
with its me y s and thee's and now's and here's, on 
the one hand, and knowing a transconceptual evap- 
oration like the absolute, on the other, it seems to 
me that to choose the latter knowledge merely be- 
cause it has been named "philosophy" is to be super- 
stitiously loyal to a name. But if names are to be 
used eulogistically, rather let us give that of phil- 
osophy to the fuller kind of knowledge, the kind 
in which perception and conception mix their lights. 
As one who calls himself a radical empiricist, 
I can find no possible excuse for not inclining 
towards Bergson's side. He and Bradley together 
have confirmed my confidence in non-"transmuted" 
percepts, and have broken my confidence in con- 
cepts down. It seems to me that their parallel lines 
of work have converged to a sharp alternative which 
now confronts everybody, and in which the rea- 
sons for one's choice must plainly appear and be 
told. Be an empiricist or be a transconceptualist, 
whichever you please, but at least say why ! I sin- 
cerely believe that nothing but inveterate anti- 
empiricist prejudice accounts for Mr. Bradley's 
choice; for at the point where he stands in the 
article I have quoted, I can discover no sensible 
reason why he should prefer the way he takes. If 

498 



[1910] BRADLEY OR BERGSON? 

he should ever take it into his head to revoke, and 
drop into the other valley, it would be a great day 
for English thought. As Kant is supposed to have 
extinguished all previous forms of rationalism, so 
Bergson and Bradley, between them, might lay post- 
Kantian rationalism permanently underground. 



499 



XXXIX 

A SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM x 

[1910] 

Much interest in the subject of religions mysti- 
cism has been shown in philosophic circles of late 
years. Most of the writings I have seen have 
treated the subject from the outside, for I know of 
no one who has spoken as having the direct author- 
ity of experience in favor of his views. I also am 
an outsider, and very likely what I say will prove 
the fact loudly enough to readers who possibly may 
stand within the pale. Nevertheless, since between 
outsiders one is as good as another, I will not leave 
my suggestion unexpressed. 

The suggestion, stated very briefly, is that states 
of mystical intuition may be only very sudden and 
great extensions of the ordinary "field of conscious- 
ness." Concerning the causes of such extensions I 
have no suggestion to make ; but the extension itself 
would, if my view be correct, consist in an immense 
spreading of the margin of the field, so that knowl- 
edge ordinarily transmarginal would become in- 
cluded, and the ordinary margin would grow more 
central. Fechner's "wave-scheme" will diagram- 

C 1 Reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and 
Scientific Methods, 1910, 7, 85-92. This article was written 
about six months before James's death. Ed.] 

500 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

matize the alteration, as I conceive it, if we sup- 
pose that the wave of present awareness, steep 
above the horizontal line that represents the plane 
of the usual "threshold," slopes away below it very 
gradually in all directions. A fall of the threshold, 
however caused, would, under these circumstances, 
produce the state of things which we see on an un- 
usually flat shore at the ebb of a spring-tide. Vast 
tracts usually covered are then revealed to view, but 
nothing rises more than a few inches above the 
water's bed, and great parts of the scene are sub- 
merged again, whenever a wave washes over them. 

Some persons have naturally a very wide, others a 
very narrow, field of consciousness. The narrow 
field may be represented by an unusually steep form 
of the wave. When by any accident the threshold 
lowers, in persons of this type — I speak here from 
direct personal experience — so that the field widens 
and the relations of its centre to matters usually 
subliminal come into view, the larger panorama 
perceived fills the mind with exhilaration and sense 
of mental power. It is a refreshing experience; 
and — such is now my hypothesis — we only have to 
suppose it to occur in an exceptionally extensive 
form, to give us a mystical paroxysm, if such a term 
be allowed. 

A few remarks about the field of consciousness 
may be needed to give more definiteness to my 
hypothesis. The field is composed at all times of a 
mass of present sensation, in a cloud of memories, 
emotions, concepts, etc. Yet these ingredients, 

501 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS U^O] 

which have to be named separately, are not sepa- 
rate, as the conscious field contains them. Its form 
is that of a much-at-once, in the unity of which 
the sensations, memories, concepts, impulses, etc., 
coalesce and are dissolved. The present field as a 
whole came continuously out of its predecessor and 
will melt into its successor as continuously again, 
one sensation-mass passing into another sensation- 
mass and giving the character of a gradually chang- 
ing present to the experience, while the memories 
and concepts carry time-coefficients which place 
whatever is present in a temporal perspective more 
or less vast. 

When, now, the threshold falls, what comes into 
view is not the next mass of sensation; for sensa- 
tion requires new physical stimulations to produce 
it, and no alteration of a purely mental threshold 
can create these. Only in case the physical stim- 
uli were already at work subliminally, preparing 
the next sensation, would whatever sub-sensation 
was already prepared reveal itself when the thresh- 
old fell. But with the memories, concepts, and 
conational states, the case is different. Nobody 
knows exactly how far we are "marginally" con- 
scious of these at ordinary times, or how far beyond 
the "margin" of our present thought transmarginal 
consciousness of them may exist. 1 There is at any 

1 Transmarginal or subliminal, the terms are synonymous. 
Some psychologists deny the existence of such consciousness al- 
together (A. H. Pierce, for example, and Munsterberg appar- 
ently). Others, e.g., Bergson, make it exist and carry the whole 
freight of our past. Others again (as Myers) would have it 

502 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

rate no definite bound set between what is central 
and what is marginal in consciousness, and the mar- 
gin itself has no definite bound a parte foris. It is 
like the field of vision, which the slightest move- 
ment of the eye will extend, revealing objects that 
always stood there to be known. My hypothesis is 
that a movement of the threshold downwards will 
similarly bring a mass of subconscious memories, 
conceptions, emotional feelings, and perceptions of 
relation, etc., into view all at once ; and that if this 
enlargement of the nimbus that surrounds the sen- 
sational present is vast enough, while no one of the 
items it contains attracts our attention singly, we 
shall have the conditions fulfilled for a kind of 
consciousness in all essential respects like that 
termed mystical. It will be transient, if the change 
of threshold is transient. It will be of reality, en- 
largement, and illumination, possibly rapturously 
so. It will be of unification, for the present coalesces 
in it with ranges of the remote quite out of its reach 
under ordinary circumstances; and the sense of 
relation will be greatly enhanced. Its form will be 
intuitive or perceptual, not conceptual, for the re- 
membered or conceived objects in the enlarged field 
are supposed not to attract the attention singly, 
but only to give the sense of a tremendous ?nuch- 
ness suddenly revealed. If they attracted attention 
separately, we should have the ordinary steep-waved 

extend (in the "telepathic" mode of communication) from one 
person's mind into another's. For the purposes of my hypothesis 
I have to postulate its existence; and once postulating it, I 
prefer not to set any definite bounds to its extent. 

503 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS f 191 °] 

consciousness, and the mystical character would 
depart. 

Such is my suggestion. Persons who know some- 
thing of mystical experience will no doubt find in it 
much to criticize. If any such shall do so with 
definiteness, it will have amply served its purpose of 
helping our understanding of mystical states to be- 
come more precise. 

The notion I have tried (at such expense of meta- 
phor) to set forth was originally suggested to me by 
certain experiences of my own, which could only 
be described as very sudden and incomprehensible 
enlargements of the conscious field, bringing with 
them a curious sense of cognition of real fact. All 
have occurred within the past five years; three of 
them were similar in type ; the fourth was unique. 

In each of the three like cases, the experience 
broke in abruptly upon a perfectly commonplace 
situation and lasted perhaps less than two minutes. 
In one instance I was engaged in conversation, but 
I doubt whether the interlocutor noticed my abstrac- 
tion. What happened each time was that I seemed 
all at once to be reminded of a past experience ; and 
this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name 
it distinctly, developed into something further that 
belonged with it, this in turn into something further 
still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving 
me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges 
of distant fact of which I could give no articulate 
account. The mode of consciousness was percep- 
tual, not conceptual — the field expanding so fast 

504 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

that there seemed no time for conception or identi- 
fication to get in its work. There was a strongly 
exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or pres- 
ent?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so 
rapidly that my intellectual processes could not 
keep up the pace. The content was thus entirely 
lost to retrospection — it sank into the limbo into 
which dreams vanish as we gradually awake. The 
feeling — I won't call it belief — that I had had a sud- 
den opening y had seen through a window, as it were, 
distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged 
with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake 
it off to-day. 

This conviction of fact-revealed, together with the 
perceptual form of the experience and the inability 
to make articulate report, are all characters of mys- 
tical states. The point of difference is that in my 
case certain special directions only, in the field of 
reality, seemed to get suddenly uncovered, whereas 
in classical mystical experiences it appears rather 
as if the whole of reality were uncovered at once. 
Uncovering of some sort is the essence of the phe- 
nomenon, at any rate, and is what, in the language 
of the Fechnerian wave-metaphor, I have used the 
expression "fall of the threshold" to denote. 

My fourth experience of uncovering had to do 
with dreams. I was suddenly intromitted into the 
cognizance of a pair of dreams that I could not re- 
member myself to have had, yet they seemed some- 
how to connect with me. I despair of giving the 
reader any just idea of the bewildering confusion 

505 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 191 °1 

of mind into which I was thrown by this, the most 
intensely peculiar experience of my whole life. I 
wrote a full memorandum of it a couple of days 
after it happened, and appended some reflections. 
Even though it should cast no light on the condi- 
tions of mysticism, it seems as if this record might 
be worthy of publication, simply as a contribution 
to the descriptive literature of pathological mental 
states. I let it follow, therefore, as originally writ- 
ten, with only a few words altered to make the 
account more clear. 

"San Francisco, Feb. 14th 1906.— The night be- 
fore last, in my bed at Stanford University, I woke 
at about 7.30 a.m., from a quiet dream of some sort, 
and whilst gathering my waking wits, seemed sud- 
denly to get mixed up with reminiscences of a dream 
of an entirely different sort, which seemed to tele- 
scope, as it were, into the first one, a dream very 
elaborate, of lions, and tragic. I concluded this to 
have been a previous dream of the same sleep ; but 
the apparent mingling of two dreams was something 
very queer, which I had never before experienced. 

"On the following night (Feb. 12-13) I awoke 
suddenly from my first sleep, which appeared to 
have been very heavy, in the middle of a dream, in 
thinking of which I became suddenly confused by 
the contents of two other dreams that shuffled them- 
selves abruptly in between the parts of the first 
dream, and of which I couldn't grasp the origin. 
Whence come these dreams? I asked. They were 
close to me, and fresh, as if I had just dreamed 

506 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

them; and yet they were far away from the first 
dream. The contents of the three had absolutely no 
connection. One had a cockney atmosphere, it had 
happened to some one in London. The other two 
were American. One involved the trying on of a 
coat (was this the dream I seemed to wake from?) 
the other was a sort of nightmare and had to do 
with soldiers. Each had a wholly distinct emo- 
tional atmosphere that made its individuality dis- 
continuous with that of the others. And yet, in a 
moment, as these three dreams alternately tele- 
scoped into and out of each other, and I seemed to 
myself to have been their common dreamer, they 
seemed quite as distinctly not to have been dreamed 
in succession, in that one sleep. When, then? Not 
on a previous night, either. When, then, and which 
was the one out of which I had just awakened? / 
could no longer tell: one was as close to me as the 
others, and yet they entirely repelled each other, 
and I seemed thus to belong to three different 
dream-systems at once, no one of which would con- 
nect itself either with the others or with my waking 
life. I began to feel curiously confused and scared, 
and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed 
already wide-awake. Presently cold shivers of 
dread ran over me : am I getting into other people's 
dreams? Is this a 'telepathic' experience? Or an 
invasion of double (or treble) personality? Or is it 
a thrombus in a cortical artery? and the beginning 
of a general mental 'confusion' and disorientation 
which is going on to develop who knows how far? 

507 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND EEVIEWS £ 191 °1 

"Decidedly I was losing hold of my 'self/ and 
making acquaintance with a quality of mental dis- 
tress that I had never known before, its nearest 
analogue being the sinking, giddying anxiety that 
one may have when, in the woods, one discovers that 
one is really 'lost,' Most human troubles look to- 
wards a terminus. Most fears point in a direction, 
and concentrate towards a climax. Most assaults 
of the evil one may be met by bracing oneself against 
something, one's principles, one's courage, one's 
will, one's pride. But in this experience all was 
diffusion from a centre, and foothold swept away, 
the brace itself disintegrating all the faster as one 
needed its support more direly. Meanwhile vivid 
perception (or remembrance) of the various dreams 
kept coming over me in alternation. Whose? 
whose? whose? Unless I can attach them, I am 
swept out to sea with no horizon and no bond, get- 
ting lost . The idea aroused the 'creeps' again, and 
with it the fear of again falling asleep and renewing 
the process. It had begun the previous night, but 
then the confusion had only gone one step, and had 
seemed simply curious. This was the second step — 
where might I be after a third step had been taken? 
My teeth chattered at the thought. 

"At the same time I found myself filled with a 
new pity towards persons passing into dementia 
with Verwirrtheit, or into invasions of secondary 
personality. We regard them as simply curious; 
but what they want in the awful drift of their being 
out of its customary self, is any principle of steadi- 

508 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

ness to hold on to. We ought to assure them and 
reassure them that we will stand by them, and 
recognize the true self in them to the end. We 
ought to let them know that we are with them 
and not (as too often we must seem to them) a part 
of the world that but confirms and publishes their 
deliquescence. 

"Evidently I was in full possession of my reflec- 
tive wits ; and whenever I thus objectively thought 
of the situation in which I was, my anxieties ceased. 
But there was a tendency to relapse into the dreams 
and reminiscences, and to relapse vividly ; and then 
the confusion recommenced, along with the emotion 
of dread lest it should develop farther. 

"Then I looked at my watch. Half -past twelve! 
Midnight, therefore. And this gave me another 
reflective idea. Habitually, on going to bed, I fall 
into a very deep slumber from which I never natu- 
rally awaken until after two. I never awaken, 
therefore, from a midnight dream, as I did to-night, 
so of midnight dreams my ordinary consciousness 
retains no recollection. My sleep seemed terribly 
heavy as I woke to-night. Dream states carry dream 
memories — why may not the two succedaneous 
dreams (whichever two of the three were succeda- 
neous) be memories of twelve o'clock dreams of pre- 
vious nights, swept in, along with the just-fading 
dream, into the just-waking system of memory? 
Why, in short, may I not be tapping, in a way pre- 
cluded by my ordinary habit of life, the midnight 
stratum of my past experiences? 

509 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS £1910] 

"This idea gave great relief — I felt now as if I 
were in full possession of my anima rationalis. I 
turned on my light, resolving to read myself to 
sleep. But I didn't read, I felt drowsy instead, and, 
putting out the light, soon was in the arms of 
Morpheus. 

"I woke again two or three times before day- 
break with no dream-experiences, and finally, with 
a curious, but not alarming, confusion between two 
dreams, similar to that which I had had the previ- 
ous morning, I awoke to the new day at seven. 

"Nothing peculiar happened the following night, 
so the thing seems destined not to develop any 
further." 1 

1 1 print the rest of my memorandum in the shape of a note : — 

"Several ideas suggest themselves that make the observation 
instructive. 

"First, the general notion, now gaining ground in mental 
medicine, that certain mental maladies may be foreshadowed in 
dream-life, and that therefore the study of the latter may be 
profitable. 

"Then the specific suggestion, that states of 'confusion,' loss 
of personality, apraxia, etc., so often taken to indicate cortical 
lesion or degeneration of dementic type, may be very superficial 
functional affections. In my own case the confusion was fou- 
droyante — a state of consciousness unique and unparalleled in 
my sixty-four years of the world's experience ; yet it alternated 
quickly with perfectly rational states, as this record shows. It 
seems, therefore, merely as if the threshold between the ra- 
tional and the morbid state had, in my case, been temporarily 
lowered, and as if similar confusions might be very near the 
line of possibility in all of us. 

"There are also the suggestions of a telepathic entrance into 
some one else's dreams, and of a doubling up of personality. 
In point of fact I don't know now 'who' had those three dreams, 
or which one T first woke up from, so quickly did they substi- 
tute themselves back and forth for each other, discontinuously. 

510 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

The distressing confusion of mind in this experi- 
ence was the exact opposite of mystical illumination, 
and equally unmystical was the definiteness of what 
was perceived. But the exaltation of the sense of 
relation was mystical (the perplexity all revolved 
about the fact that the three dreams both did and 
did not belong in the most intimate way together) ; 
and the sense that reality was being uncovered was 
mystical in the highest degree. To this day I feel 
that those extra dreams were dreamed in reality, 
but when, where, and by whom, I can not guess. 

In the Open Court for December, 1909, Mr. Fred- 
erick Hall narrates a fit of ether-mysticism which 
agrees with my formula very well. When one of his 
doctors made a remark to the other, he chuckled, 
for he realized that these friends "believed they saw 
real things and causes, but they didn't, and I 
did. ... I was where the causes were and to see 
them required no more mental ability than to recog- 
nize a color as blue. . . . The knowledge of how 
little [the doctors] actually did see, coupled with 
their evident feeling that they saw all there was, 
was funny to the last degree. . . . [They] knew as 
little of the real causes as does the child who, view- 
ing a passing train and noting its revolving wheels, 
supposes that they, turning of themselves, give to 
coaches and locomotive their momentum. Or im- 

Their discontinuity was the pivot of the situation. My sense 
of it was as 'vivid' and 'original' an experience as anything 
Hume could ask for. And yet they kept telescoping ! 

"Then there is the notion that by- waking at certain hours we 
may tap distinct strata of ancient dream-memory." 

511 



COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS t 191 °] 

agine a man seated in a boat, surrounded by dense 
fog, and out of the fog seeing a flat stone leap from 
the crest of one wave to another. // he had always 
sat thus, his explanations must be very crude as 
compared with those of a man whose eyes could 
pierce fog, and who saw upon the shore the boy 
skipping stones. In some such way the remarks 
of the two physicians seemed to me like the last two 
'skips' of a stone thrown from my side. . . . All 
that was essential in the remark I knew before it 
was made. Thus to discover convincingly and for 
myself, that the things which are unseen are those 
of real importance, this was sufficiently stimulat- 
ing." 

It is evident that Mr. Hall's marginal field got 
enormously enlarged by the ether, yet so little de- 
fined as to its particulars that what he perceived 
was mainly the thoroughgoing causal integration 
of its whole content. That this perception brought 
with it a tremendous feeling of importance and 
superiority is a matter of course. 

I have treated the phenomenon under discussion 
as if it consisted in the uncovering of tracts of con- 
sciousness. Is the consciousness already there wait- 
ing to be uncovered? and is it a veridical revelation 
of reality? These are questions on which I do not 
touch. In the subjects of the experience the "emo- 
tion of conviction" is always strong, and sometimes 
absolute. The ordinary psychologist disposes of 
the phenomenon under the conveniently "scientific" 
head of petit mal, if not of "bosh" or "rubbish." 

512 



[1910] SUGGESTION ABOUT MYSTICISM 

But we know so little of the noetic value of ab- 
normal mental states of any kind that in my opinion 
we had better keep an open mind and collect facts 
sympathetically for a long time to come. We shall 
not understand these alterations of consciousness 
either in this generation or in the next. 



513 



BY WILLIAM JAMES 

The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 8vo. New York: Henry 
Holt & Co. London: Macmillan & Co. 1890. 

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The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. 

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Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doc- 
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Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of 
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Longmans. Green & Co. 1899. 

The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York and London: 
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Pragmatism. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co. i9°7- 

The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism. New York 
and London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1909. 

A Pluralistic Universe. New York and London: Longmans, Green & 
Co. 1909. 

Memories and Studies. New York and London : Longmans, Green & 
Co. 1911. 

Some Problems in Philosophy. New York and London: Longmans, 
Green & Co. 191 1. 

Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York and London: Longmans, 
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Collected Essays and Reviews. 8vo. New York and London: 
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Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James. 

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Letters of William James. Edited, with Biographical Introduction 
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INDEX 



Absolute, The: 467-469. 
American Psychological As- 
sociation: 371. 
Anaesthesia: 365-370. 

Bain, A.: 26-29, 93, 102, 125, 

127, 130, 183, 260. 
Baldwin, J. M. : 390. 
Bastian, H. C. : 164. 
Beard, G. M.: 241-242. 
Belief : 205-206. 
Bergson, H. : 491-499. 
Bernhardt: 186. 
Berkley: 365. 
Berkeley: 434. 
Biran, Maine de : 181. 
Blood, B. P.: 134-135. 
Brachet: 265. 
Bradley, F. H. : 333-341, 491- 

499. 
Bridgman, Laura: 453-458. 

Carlyle: 132. 
Carpenter, W. B. : 183. 
Cattell, J. McK. : 390. 
Clifford, W. K. : 66, 118, 137- 

146. 
Cognition. See Knowledge. 
Consciousness. See Mind. 

D'Alembert: 90, 127. 
Darwin : 21, 63. 
Degeneration : 401-405. 
Dewey, J. : 445, 447, 450. 
Dizziness: 220-243. 
Duhring, E. : 132. 

Emerson : 62. 

Emotion : 187-189, 244-275, 

346-370. 
Empiricism : 4-11, 28. 
Ethics: 147-150. 
Evolution: 147. 



Faith: 69-82, 140. 
Fechner, G. T. : 118, 500. 
Feeling: 347, 364. 
Ferrier, D. : 164-167, 187. 
Ford, E. : 328-332. 
Freedom : 208. 
Fullerton, G. S. : 397. 

Genius: 401-405. 

German Traits : 12-13. 

God, Conception of: 414-429, 

464-465. 
Gore, W. C. : 467-469. 
Graefe, A. : 171, 174. 

Hall, F. : 511. 
Hartmann : 13-17, 87, 99. 
Hegel: 127, 282-283. 
Helmholtz: 31, 169-170, 174, 

231. 
Herbabt : 209, 392. 
Hering, E. : 174, 177. 
Hodgson, R. : 438-441, 484- 

490. 
Hodgson, S.: 133, 373-375, 

380. 
Howison, G. : 430. 
Humanism : 447, 448-452. 
Hume: 22, 99, 100, 209, 435. 
Huxley, T. H. : 66, 72, 100, 

108. 

Idealism : 276-284, 373, 492. 
Identity: 339-341. 
Ideo-Motor Action : 180-187. 
Illusion : 285-302. 
Instinct : 248-250. 
Irons, D. : 349, 362. 

Jackson, H. : 153. 

Kant : 93, 131, 436, 499. 
Keller, Helen : 453-458. 
Knowledge : 278-282, 371-400, 
470-483, 491-499, 505. 



515 



INDEX 



Ladd, G. T. : 316-327, 342-345, 

392-393. 
Lange, 0. : 244, 346, 348. 
Lewes, G. H. : 4-11, 40-42, 91, 

107, 110, 155. 
Lombroso, C. : 401-405. 
Lotze : 99, 154, 182, 304. 

Mach, E. : 179. 

Meinong, A. : 398. 

Mill, James : 111. 

Mill, J. S. : 8, 9, 29-30, 61, 93, 

100, 113. 
Miller, D. S. : 359, 377. 
Mind: 40-42, 43-68, 144, 371- 

400. 
Mitchell, Weir : 285, 291, 294. 
Muller, J. : 152. 
Munk, H. : 184-185. 
Munsterberg, H. : 359, 390. 
Mysticism : 500-513. 

Nichols, H. : 358-359, 388. 

Papini, G. : 459-466. 

Peirce, O. S. : 20, 406, 410 ff., 

448. 
Personal Idealism : 442-444, 

450. 
Pessimism : 12-19. 
Pfleiderer, E. : 12-19. 
Piper, Mrs. : 438-441, 484-490. 
Positivism: 10, 28, 129, 276. 
Pragmatism : 406-437, 448, 

450, 459, 466. 
Psychical Research : 1-3, 

438-441, 484-490. 
Psychology, Method of: 97, 

155, 316-327, 342-345. 
Putnam, J. J. : 164-165. 

Rationality : 69-82, 83-136. 
Religion : 276-284. 
Renan: 36-39. 



Renouvier, C. : 26, 29-35, 69, 
81-82, 83, 98, 121, 131, 133, 
151, 193-194, 303-409. 

Resemblance, Relation of : 
333-341. 

Robertson, G. C. : 310-315. 

Royce, J.: 276-284, 430, 481, 
482. 

Ruskin: 269. 

Russell, J. E. : 470-483. 

Sargent, E. : 1. 

Schiller, F. C. S. : 443, 444, 

448-452. 
Schopenhauer : 14, 15, 17, 23, 

88, 99. 
Seth, A. : 322. 

Similarity. See Resemblance. 
Sollier, P. : 366-370. 
Soul. See Mind. 
Space, Perception of: 310- 

315, 328-332. 
Spencer : 30, 33, 43-68, 90, 91, 

99, 107, 114, 118, 147-150. 
Strumpell, L. : 272-275. 
Stumpf, K. : 330, 334, 340. 
Sturt, H. : 442-444. 

Taine: 112, 118. 

Truth : 406-437, 448, 449, 466, 

470-483. 
Tyndall: 107. 

Ueberweg, F. : 87. 

Voltaire : 43. 

Watson, J. : 116. 

Will : 33-35, 50, 143, 151-219, 

303-309. 
Worcester, W. L. : 349-366. 
Wright, Chauncey : 20-25, 

107. 
Wundt, W. : 153, 346-348, 386. 



516 



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